Tap of a key, a man’s voice: “. . . yeah, but transistors were always vulnerable to current overload, burning out just when y’needed them.”
Tap of a key, a woman’s voice: “. . . Hi, Mom, thanks for the voice mail. I had a great birthday party with some friends. I don’t really know if our time is the same as yours any more, but I thought about you all day.”
Tap of a key, a man’s voice: “. . . of course the Hydra was a hell of a car. My old man had three over the years, but he always said the magnetos were slowly killing us, like we’re strapped inside a magnet, he said, and it was messing up our brain cells.”
It was impossible to listen to and read the records of hundreds of people surveilled over the course of so many years. Our crew was forced to concentrate on key individuals in the computer department, and while this offered our best hope, in the end it produced nothing that we could use. We also went through the ultra-secret DSI internal staff records, hoping that we would stumble across a lead. The executives’ files were minimalist in quantity and sparkling clean in content. Here too, the files of Skinner and Larson were empty.
We located the wing on deck A where DSI executives had lived. Searching the spacious apartments, we learned that Skinner was a lover of vampire novels. In his desk drawer, under lock and key, was an e-manuscript in progress, titled Psychopathia Socialis. It wasn’t about vampires; it was about us, the space voyageurs. Larson’s private hologram screen revealed that he was a lover of razor-board racing and pornography. In neither of these rooms was there a max. They may have had portable maxes in the briefcases they had always carried with them, but these were missing. Their personal offices likewise failed to produce anything helpful.
I felt a certain pathos when I investigated the suite where the Nephew had lived. Though it was next door to Don and Raydawn’s place, it was not quite as large and luxurious as theirs. His bedroom was just as he had left it. It resembled the lair of a spoiled adolescent, strewn with clothing and electronic gadgets, including his collection of cameras. There were, however, numerous folios of the very fine photographs he had taken on Nova, mainly landscapes and wildlife. On the bedside table, I found a journal of sorts. Like me, he had used pen and paper. Guiltily, I read a few pages, lying to myself that I might find clues to solve our computer problems. It was pure curiosity, of course. I wondered what it had been like for him, considering his position in the world, this unfriendly offspring of the uppermost echelon of privilege and power. I found that, for the most part, during the past ten years he had struggled with an excruciating sense of depersonalization, a loneliness so deep that he had come close to suicide on a number of occasions. There were several references to his uncle, expressed in tones of contempt, even hatred for what the man represented.
“I am invisible”, he wrote early on in the journey. “I am an image. I am defined by a biological accident that places me close to the pinnacle of absolutism.”
There was much in these pages that revealed he was a shy introvert, albeit one who was capable of acting the confident extrovert. In his inner life, he felt imprisoned by solitude, ever searching for “the Real”, as he called it, ever searching for meaning within the closed circle of himself. Throughout the voyage, he had chosen to live as a recluse because he could not trust that others would value him as a person independent of his status. Now I understood why he had spoken to me so rudely that day, years ago, when I interrupted him in the library reading Shakespeare sonnets.
The final line of the journal, probably written hours before his death in the Temple, reads: “It is yet possible that I will find love. It is not impossible that I will learn to love.”
It was all very sad, and I felt some regret that I had not pushed harder to break through the walls of his isolation.
*
In summation, our investigations brought a solution no nearer. Despite our every effort, we had turned up not a hint of an ultra back-up system. This left us no choice but to launch a painstaking search through the holds down on PHM, in the hope that we would stumble across replacement consoles. It seemed to me that it would be a strange oversight to neglect storing replacements for such crucial items, and thus I and my fellow searchers launched a new kind of expedition.
The men in charge of holds were eager to help, and they lent a hand all the way. They opened their records of the manifest, and we pored over these lists, looking for anything that might even remotely be understood as mechanical or electronic. It took us years to go through the stores, as we opened every single box in the onboard warehouses. There were times when I was so fascinated by some of the items we found, I completely forgot for a few minutes that we were racing against time. For example, there were trunks full of glass beads and shiny trinkets (for trading with natives, I suppose). There were boxes of salt and pepper shakers in discordant designs (clowns, male and female donkeys, black and white poodles, film stars). There were barge-loads of women’s cosmetics, eighteen thousand tooth brushes, and a far greater number of toothpaste tubes, a mountain of boxes containing condoms (“Nature’s Best”), alongside digital clocks and antique wind-up alarm clocks, three cuckoo clocks, an enormous African drum with a synthetic zebra-skin top, a crate full of axes (regrettably unseen by the pioneers when they scrambled through the area looking for things to take back to Nova), a ton of laundry detergent, and so forth. It was like a general store gone mad, and eventually we searchers were numbed by the sheer volume and variety of items, the bulk of it thoughtfully chosen by the quartermasters who had outfitted the ship, but some of it simply bizarre.
We also checked the other major hold, which contained all the samples brought from Nova. A good deal of this was minerals, but nearly half of the space contained endless shelves of flora, small reptiles and amphibians, and microbiological samples suspended in vials of liquid preservative. There were thousands of insect species in display cases, including the flamboyant butterflies. Enormous freezer lockers contained the bodies of hundreds of animal species captured and killed, dissected or vivisected, and preserved for further studies back on Earth. This section was investigated more quickly than the others, though I lingered there a while to placate my curiosity. Many of the specimens were creatures I had not seen on the panorama screen and max presentations. I put an end to my diversion, however, when I came across three huge bodies of the giraffe-like creatures hanging from hooks in a freezer locker, a male, a female, and a yearling. The mother’s abdomen was splinted open with a transparent pane inserted, showing a dead baby in utero.
We also searched through the food holds on the remote chance that a console might have been mistakenly stored in the wrong place. Suffice it to say that the things we stumbled upon pleased the cooks, who were ever ready to try new recipes. The liquor holds beckoned me, but I resisted. Staying sober was now a life-and-death matter.
This search took us well into the fifth year after the gunfight, and it produced no results that would solve our problem.
*
Others had been busy throughout this time, teaching themselves circuitry from manuals downloaded off the main computer. This master brain continued to confound us, since it faithfully performed its maintenance of the internal life-support and life-comfort services. It was like a man who had had a stroke. Some of his limbs worked and some didn’t; portions of memory were intact and others weren’t. We were endlessly baffled by it, though in a general sense we knew that the damaged sections were restricted to the part of the cortex which determined where the ship was going and how it would get there.
At first, we had believed that only the consoles had been damaged, a circuit connection problem, like the broken spinal cord of a quadriplegic. All his organs still functioned, but he could not control them, could not feel them from the neck down. Above all, his mind was clear. Later we learned, through deep probes into the main computer, that the e-bolts fired accidentally into the consoles on that terrible day had sent charges back down the line and into the computer, jumping circuit breakers
and other kinds of safety blocks. It had all happened in less than a second. The damage was not just physical; it was, so to speak, mental.
The Kosmos was still on course, relentlessly approaching the year when deceleration should begin. And this was our single most daunting challenge—how to initiate the reverse thrust engines at the precise moment in the precise quantity that would slow us at the right time and in the right sequence, avoiding the alternative disasters of, on one hand, the instant liquefaction of us all by hitting the brakes too hard, and on the other, a continuing plummet through the cosmos at one hundred and seventy thousand kilometers per second, taking us beyond our solar system into infinite space. The latter option seemed preferable by far, for we might live comfortably for a very long time with our resources, like a person in a splendid city who has everything he needs, and never leaves it. Manifests indicated that there was food for a thousand people for ten more years, and we were roughly a tenth that number. The number of pioneers who had returned to Nova was 67, which left 110 now on board. At the very least, we could thrive for another century, unless we slammed into a star in our path, which was statistically nearly impossible, given the vast spaces between stars. However, without exception, we all desired to return to our troubled planet. Despite its faults, it was our home.
The single surviving nuclear engineer was an elderly Czech with a keen mind and limitless knowledge of reactors as sources of energy. He had been hard at work ever since the gun-battle, familiarizing himself with the operation of the ship’s unique propulsion functions, about which he had less knowledge. His area of responsibility during the voyage had been the monitoring of the auxiliary reactor that gave us heat and light and hot water. There was a separate primary reactor for propulsion, but its keepers were gone, and so he tried to acquaint himself with this as well. He told us with profound apologies that the mechanics of lowering and raising the reverse-thrust engines, and operating them with proper timing and burst quantity (a function that only a computer program could accomplish), were simply beyond his capabilities. Even so, he spent seven long, mentally arduous years studying the mechanics and program manuals to see what he could learn.
He was often frustrated by gaps in the manuals, zones of information blanked out because of patent or security reasons. He had a fit of temper or two, demanding to know why there was no override code for such blocks, why there was no command center in the propulsion department that bypassed the master computer and bypassed the KC control, why the people who made this ship were so stupid, and so forth. None of us had an answer for him. He became morose toward the end and took to drink. To his credit, he continued to strain himself to the outermost limits of his capabilities, writing new programs that he hoped would reconnect the mechanics to the main computer, though the tests he made with these proved to be useless.
The community was canvassed to see if there might be individuals among them with electronics or computer skills—or any other kind of technical or mechanical knowledge. It was a long shot, but one never knew where a genius or savant might pop up. A few cleaning people stepped forward, and, after hesitating a little, they said that maybe they could figure out what was wrong with the ship’s computer. They confessed that they knew how to cannibalize personal computers and had built their own in times past. One man had been a welder back home, and he also knew how to use a soldering gun for finer work. Another told us that before the flight his hobby had been in the field of shortwave radio. When he was younger, he had built several sets from scratch, despite it being illegal. He also knew a lot about radar and analog pulse-density modulation, though his first love was ancient crystal radio sets. So we took these people on and explained our problem to them—rather, the little we knew about our problem. Nevertheless, after years of tinkering and experimenting, nothing effective came from it.
*
The communications system continued to work just fine. Early on, our pioneers knew about our plight, though the time lapse between appropriate responses back and forth grew steadily longer as our distance from Nova increased. None of their company was able to offer solutions. In the same proportion, our communications with Earth-base became ever more synchronized as the distance between us decreased.
During the final two years, they radioed a massive amount of data to us, with the blocked-out information zones supplied. The new material made sense to the computer people, and they accomplished much in terms of transferring operations portions of the damaged “brain” to unused data banks. Again and again, they tried to restore broken or zapped consoles, rebuild and rewire and fire up the circuits, but their trial runs failed to solve our major problem. Despite all efforts, the reverse-thrust engines refused to lower beneath the body of the ship. There was an improvement of neural connections, a rebooting of some secondary functions, but not enough to make deceleration happen.
*
During the month before the approaching deceleration event, I fought a growing despondency. Many others struggled with the same thing. On the whole, this was a time when optimists were sifted from pessimists, but no one could know which of the two were realists.
I, employing my favorite conflict-resolution method, turned to drink. I should say returned—vodka, the pain-killer of my youth, my old best friend. I spent a lot of time in the panorama room with a jug in my hand, watching our approaching solar system grow larger. If I had not gone off on a shooting spree seven years ago, if I had not indulged in my little tantrum, we would soon have begun our long, gentle approach to Earth’s orbit, right on schedule. Now I would spend the rest of my life in outer space, eating and drinking merrily, if I did not shoot myself.
The Commander had returned the gun to me. Presuming it was my mine, he had handed it over, without bullets, somewhere around year five of the homeward journey. Later, with the aid of some housebreaker skills, I located a box of bullets in Paul’s apartment, hidden under a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in his bedside table drawer.
Thus armed, I was prepared to meet any eventuality.
*
Now I come to the events that determined the end of it all.
Those of us who had tried to save the ship throughout these past years gathered together in the command center on KC deck to observe the moment when deceleration should rightly have begun. It would be a non-event, we were certain, yet we felt it necessary to be present. We would see that the ship continued to hurl itself placidly into infinity, without resistance, confirming what we already knew.
The moment came and went. Nothing changed on the screen above the command module. There were no shudders from ignition of counter-thrust, which was as it should be, since the reverse engines remained doggedly inside the ship. Now we knew that what we had anticipated would be enacted as fact. Our future lay out there among the stars.
And then the inconceivable happened. A man came running forward from the navigation department and cried out that the maneuver vents had begun firing. The ship was turning a fraction of a degree.
And it continued to turn, degree after degree.
People scrambled in all directions, consulting the intact instrument consoles and those that had been rebuilt, checking readings and shouting out what they were seeing on their screens.
The Commander strode back with the navigation man to his section. I followed them and stood behind them, listening.
“I don’t know why,” said a lieutenant commander, “but we’re turning on a tangential course.”
“But what’s making it happen?” asked the Commander.
“I have no idea why the maneuver vents are suddenly functional. But they are working. They’re turning the ship as if we have begun deceleration.”
“Will we penetrate the orbital plane according to return flight plan?”
“I’m not entirely certain yet, but if the course correction continues, we may be retracing the outbound flight plan made nineteen years ago.”
“What?”
The man looked down at his console. “It’s re
ally too early to tell, but the readings are changing steadily, the ship adjusting our trajectory moment by moment.”
The man watched his screens for a time. We stood by him silently, unable to assess the meaning of the complex time / space data he was looking at.
Finally, he looked up with a frown. “Factoring our track of adjustment, the computer is extrapolating that we’ll be coming in on the orbital plane.
“But we’re not decelerating.”
“I know, sir. And that means we have a situation here. We’re bearing on course for intersection with Earth-orbit at too high a speed.”
“Could it be a stellar compass error?”
“All the instruments give the same readings.”
“When do we intersect with Earth-orbit?”
“It would have been five months from now, if we were decelerating steadily. If we maintain this velocity, and if the auto-navigation continues to correct for the differences between low-speed and highspeed trajectories, we have approximately seventy-two days, Kosmos time, before impact.”
“Impact?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You mean there’s a navigational lock on the planet?”
“It looks that way. We’ll know more as we observe the ship’s progress.”
“Change the course, Lieutenant Commander; put us out into space.” The man bent over his console and tapped command keys, checked his screen, read instruments, and looked up. “It’s not responding.”
“That can’t be”, said the Commander in a calm voice. “If the maneuvering system is working and if it can send data to you, we can send data to it.”
“It doesn’t seem to be receiving it, or maybe it’s ignoring it. It’s not responding to commands.”
“Then shield the navigation intake, or shut down the N system entirely.”
The lieutenant commander tried both and fixed his eyes on his screen.
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