by Al Macy
“If I do this”—I looked at the president—“I want to be permanently excused from jury duty.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Marbecka stood on the bridge of her research ship and glared at the personal torture chamber that was to be her home for the next two days.
Falbex landed on the perch next to her. “Don’t worry, Marbecka. We’ll be there before you know it.”
She looked at him but said nothing. They were about to travel three hundred forty million miles from Earth to Mars. Her spaceship, Investigator, would accelerate at five g’s for one day then turn around and decelerate for the same amount of time. Without her torture chamber, known as the disportion unit, the crushing g-forces would kill her.
Falbex manipulated some controls and spoke, his voice echoing throughout the craft. “Everyone to disportion units immediately.”
Marbecka stepped into her slender tube. Its door snapped shut, and the drug delivery system injected her with anti-g pharmaceuticals. Acceleration began promptly, and the disportion unit spun her like a plucked bird on a rotisserie. The carefully designed sequence of rotations protected her organs from the damaging effects of a constant, one-directional force. She closed her eyes. No one should have to go through this.
But Falbex had been right. The time passed quickly in the hallucinogenic haze induced by the drugs. They arrived on station, and Marbecka staggered out from the unit and vomited into a receptacle designed for that purpose. She ruffled and smoothed her feathers.
Time to solve the mystery.
At the exact moment of the confluence rift in Jake’s universe, they’d detected a space-time expansion somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. Too big of a coincidence to be ignored. So, she brought her ship here, near Mars, to measure the residual gravity waves. Could she discover the source of the expansion? Might that help her avoid the collision of the universes? She had to try.
While preparing for the measurement, she stopped and stared straight ahead. She rehashed her worries about Jake’s universe.
Jake had been sent back in time one year. That gave his scientists plenty of time to build a communication device and a paratransitter. Everything depended on the silly humans now.
She looked at her watch. They’d scheduled the paratransit to occur in twenty-five days’ time. Since the humans hadn’t gotten their communication device working, there was no way to reschedule it. What the hell was going on over there?
Once they had a successful paratransit under their wing, materials could be sent to Jake’s world, and they could assemble their anticollider. Time was running out. The collision could happen at any time. She grabbed one of her feathers with her beak. No! I won’t start pulling out my feathers!
The comm speaker blared. “Marbecka, this is the bridge. We have a problem.”
She fluttered back down to her perch. “Marbecka here.”
Nothing more came from the bridge. She waggled her head in puzzlement. An emergency? Were they too busy to explain? After making the final adjustments to the grav-wave detector, she handed control to the computer.
She flew to the inter-deck transfer well and up to the bridge. Wings were ideal in microgravity. Marbecka pitied the humans, who’d have no way to change direction without pushing off from walls. Maybe that’s why they had no space program. Jake had described their pitiful space station. Had it really been shot down by—what did he call them?—terrorists?
No one on the bridge spoke. Each person concentrated on his or her controls.
She flew to Falbex and perched beside him. “What’s going on?”
“Check this out.” He pointed to the holoview hovering in the center of the bridge. Investigator floated in the center of the display, stationary relative to Foegon and Mars.
“That looks fine to me. Is there something I’m supposed to be seeing?” She stood on one foot, glad to be done with the tense grav-wave setup. Here, she was just a sightseer.
Falbex pointed to the center of the display. “Feel it.”
She looked at him then put a hand into the hologram. Her hand bumped something. Something that wasn’t visible. Her crest popped up, and she put her other hand in, palpating the unseen object. “There’s something here. It feels like … a ship?”
“Right.”
“But why can’t—”
“It’s invisible to all our conventional scanners.”
“But—”
“It’s cloaked.”
“What? Do the colonies have that technology? We don’t, do we?”
“If they do, I’ve never heard of it.” Falbex blinked rapidly and his wings trembled.
“Intentional?” She waggled her head.
“Yes, of course. No natural phenomenon would do this. Computer, please render the cloaked vessel.”
The spaceship appeared in the holoviewer.
Marbecka waggled her head. “How far away is this thing?”
“It’s nine hundred kilometers distant but approaching fast. It will reach us in fourteen minutes.”
Marbecka consulted her research display. “The grav-wave measurement is in fifteen minutes.”
The navigation officer spoke. “Captain, negative on deceleration.”
“Okay, that clinches it. I’m sorry, Marbecka, I’m aborting. That cloaked thing isn’t slowing down, and it isn’t responding to our hails. When we changed course, it followed. We’re going to fly away. Terminate the grav-wave measurement now.” He switched on the ship-wide PA. “Everyone to disportion units immediately.”
Her crest popped up. “But we need this—”
“That’s an order.”
Marbecka remotely terminated the measurement and stepped into her disportion unit. Falbex chose an evasion routine and transferred control to the computer. Investigator accelerated at thirty-seven g’s in a direction perpendicular to the cloaked ship’s course.
Marbecka exhaled then struggled to inhale. Can’t do it. The disportion unit started its nauseating spin sequence. Her vision faded as a result of the drugs.
After twelve seconds of punishing acceleration, the ship dropped to two g’s. Everyone stepped from their disportion units.
The navigator checked his readings. “He’s changed course, sir. Following us.”
“Interception?”
“One minute.”
“Send the surrender message immed—”
“Incoming energy bursts!”
“What are they?” Falbex zoomed the holoviewer in on the projectiles. Two pulsating bundles of light accelerated toward Investigator.
“Unknown. Nothing we’ve encountered.”
“Stasis shields up. Ready evacuation.” Captain Falbex kept his eye on the incoming fireballs. They passed through the outer shields. “Evacuate!” He flipped up the cover and slammed his fist onto the emergency evac switch.
With a crash, the bridge jumped ten meters to one side, throwing everyone into a wall before they could get their wings out.
The evacuation force field whipped Marbecka into an escape pod. Ow! An explosion near the ceiling was the last thing she saw.
Her pod snapped into the escape tube and began its journey out of the ship.
Crashes, explosions, and the sound of rending metal assaulted her ears. Doppler shifts turned the sounds into a strange and terrible symphony.
Her tail was bent painfully up beside her wing. Would the ship explode with her still inside? She screeched.
In seconds, she popped from the hull like a seed ejected from a smylon plant.
Jets used up the pod’s limited fuel to stabilize her. By chance, her pod faced the ship when the spacecraft exploded. A ringside seat. She was far enough away to escape annihilation.
Uncomfortable but alive, she ruffled her feathers with relief. But wait. Something big tumbled slowly toward her. It didn’t move left, right, up, or down; it just tumbled. And grew larger. A collision course.
She looked for the control panel she knew didn’t exist. The pod was meant to drift, send out a s
ignal, and wait to be recovered. Nothing more. Two other pods drifted nearby—out of danger. Why couldn’t she have been over there? Her ears still rang from the explosions.
The tumbling object continued toward her. A piece of Investigator’s hull. It certainly wouldn’t hit her, would it? The odds of that were too low.
It kept coming, tumbling slowly. Would it pass below her claws? She pushed against the pod walls until her wings ached. Of course, that wouldn’t help. She panicked—squawking, fluttering, kicking.
Wait! It would pass below her. But the spin. If it were at the wrong orientation when passing, it might clip her.
But if she were lucky …
It indeed went below her, but the top edge of the hull section tapped the bottom edge of her pod. It imparted such kinetic energy that the pod spun like a propeller. With each cycle, her head first smashed back into the headrest then slammed forward into the viewport. Marbecka’s world went black.
* * *
Two weeks after the confluence rift rocked the world, I met my other self, Jake-Human-2. We got together in Rockport, Missouri, in a building that straddled the border between the two universes.
Nations around the globe struggled with their policies on border crossings. In the end, they did what governments always do in a situation like that: They outlawed all crossings.
The laws were impossible to enforce. Many crossed over to live with loved ones who had died.
The exact border in our Rockport building was evident, since the rift had sliced a desk in half. Why the border was fixed, on a planet that was rotating and hurtling through space, made no sense to me. We’d have to ask the dinobirds about that.
The organizers of the meeting had set up a worktable. The top held a low Plexiglas barrier, so neither Jake nor I would mistakenly put our arm across. Jake’s side figured to benefit from this meeting more than mine. His world was still under the thumb of Cronkite, and it was my job to fill him in on everything we knew and describe how we defeated the alien.
We shook hands, and our guards freaked.
“Sirs! You must not cross the boundary with any part of your bodies.”
He was right, but who could resist shaking hands with yourself?
I asked Jake to not bring Mary, but of course he understood my true feelings. He brought her. I took a step to cross over and hug her but stopped. Don’t be selfish. If the confluence collapsed at that moment, Charli and Sophia might never see me again.
I stared at my first wife. She was even more beautiful than I had remembered. She blushed, and heat rose into my cheeks.
I rubbed my face and introduced Charli. “Charli, this is Mary, and of course, you know Jake.”
Jake and I chuckled at my lame joke. Charli punched me on the shoulder.
My two wives smiled at one another. Did they feel jealousy, or was it like a meeting of the wives of identical twins? A picture of Jake sleeping with Mary popped into my head. Was I jealous? No, but if I didn’t have Charli, I might have felt differently.
Jake and I sat, and I brought him up to speed. In my universe, the alien who had tried to take over the world had developed a strange fixation on me.
I described how Cronkite’s stupid desire to fight me, mano a mano, led to his downfall.
Tossing a thumb drive onto Jake’s side of the desk, I said, “We’ve studied Cronkite extensively, and all the data is on there. Biology, psychology, everything we know.”
Jake shook his head. “It’s really awful. Cronkite lives in the White House. When he’s not there, it’s vacant. The economies are spiraling down. In ten years, Earth will be a smoking ruin unless Cronkite gets bored and moves on.”
“You haven’t had any contact from DJ1, the diamond-shaped spacecraft?”
“No. What is it, do you know? We detected it, but we know nothing about it.”
“Yes.” I leaned forward. “This is important. DJ1 is a super-high-tech probe from a galactic association of civilizations. It didn’t contact us until we had vanquished Cronkite. It didn’t want to interfere. Like the Prime Directive thing. Maybe you could convince it to help.”
“How?”
“Just send it a radio message. It can understand English. Where is Cronkite now?”
“No one knows,” Jake replied. “He tends to go off and hibernate now and then. Cronkite disabled all our tracking systems, so whenever he leaves the vicinity of Earth, we don’t know where he is or when he’s coming back. And now, we don’t know whether he’s in Human-1 or Human-2.”
* * *
Marbecka’s pod drifted through space, a tiny, spinning pill, alone in the vastness of the solar system. Solitary confinement was profoundly stressful for her since celanos were flocking creatures.
She kept her eyes closed except for occasional glimpses out the viewport. Where was the rescue ship?
Celanos, like other flying creatures, rarely had trouble with dizziness, but this was too much. The pod spun head over claws at a rate of around one cycle per second. It simultaneously rotated along its long axis. She’d vomited twice; the smelly residue plastered the walls.
The simple display next to the viewport had limited information. She’d been in the pod two days, unconscious for only the first hour.
She did the calculations in her head. She’d traveled about seven hundred thousand kilometers, fifty-five Earth diameters. At least she hadn’t hit Mars, unlikely as that would have been.
Holding her breath, she peeked out the viewport, something that threw her stomach toward her gullet. Mars was as wide as Earth’s moon as seen from home.
She could do nothing but wait. The pinger was still going. She had plenty of food. Her discomfort sucked, as Jake would say, but someone would rescue her. This would all be over someday.
Why was “sucked” used to denote something that was lousy? Jake had just shrugged and smiled when she’d asked about it. English was such a silly language.
Back to serious matters: Who attacked them? And why? Marbecka eventually drifted off to sleep and dreamed the obnoxious spinning had finally stopped. She woke and opened her eyes. It had stopped.
She was being rescued!
The walls of a cargo hold slid into view as her pod drifted backward into a ship. But the walls were closer. The hatch was small. This was a foreign ship.
The pod shuddered to a stop, and the seal was blown. An overwhelming peppermint odor flooded in. Ah, that explained a lot. She made herself thin and trembled.
Two huge zealos, red like those on Earth but twice as large, opened the hatch. They yanked her out and snapped a black hood over her head.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Three weeks after learning I’d be heading back to Dinoworld, I’d resigned myself to it. I was a tough guy, right? I’d play the cards I was dealt.
Elon Gray and I stood in his lab, with a live video feed of the huge paratransit device under construction. On the screen, engineers wearing hairnets and paper booties swarmed over the mass of pipes, wiring, and exotic materials.
The confluence rift had convinced the world’s governments to loosen the purse strings, and the scientists had purchased the exotic materials needed to finish the project. Could they get things done in time? The web’s prediction markets said no.
A countdown display clicked off the seconds until the coordinated transportation time. Eighteen days to go.
Elon brought up another display and pointed to a complex schematic diagram. “I’ve been able to make some improvements to the paratransit.”
My jaw dropped. “Wait. What? You haven’t communicated with the celanos. How can you make changes?”
“Yeah, good point.” He smiled and nodded. Elon seemed much more relaxed now that the engineers were making progress. “These mods were obvious. The dinobirds are smart but rigid in their thinking.”
He pointed to the lower corner of the diagram. “For example, this whole block here is just for safety. It allows them to abort the sequence if necessary. But that’s ridiculous. At that point,
it’s too late to abort. This is like something designed by committee. Like they had some law that required the safety circuit even though they knew it made no sense.”
He looked at me. “We do that, too. Remember when they started adding rear-facing video cameras to cars? The law said every car must have a rearview mirror, so manufacturers had to include that, even though it was unnecessary and obscured some of the forward view.”
He tapped the schematic with his finger. “When I take out this abort circuit, I’ll reduce the transit delay by half.”
I made the time-out signal with my hands. “Hold on. You’re going to make changes unilaterally? Couldn’t that be dangerous?”
Elon shrugged and waggled his hand.
“C’mon Elon. I know you’re joking.”
He laughed. “Yes, of course. Uh, mostly. No, no, don’t worry. I was mondo careful. And once we can communicate with the celanos, I think I can make it fa—”
“Seriously, don’t screw around, Elon. I’ve got to get into that thing.” I shook my finger at the live-stream video showing the huge machine under construction on Mount Rainier. “Safety features seem like a good thing to me. I don’t care if it’s slow.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and guided me to the doorway of a small room. “Check out the communication device.”
A tangle of tubes filled the walls of the room, looking like the small intestines of an elephant. Some tubes were clear, and occasional flashes, like little lightning bolts, zapped through them. Everything funneled down to a display on a desk.
I pulled on my ear. “How does it work? In layman’s terms, please.”
“It’s simple and complicated at the same time.”
Where had I heard that?
“It’s based on the fact that events in parallel universes interfere with one another. Particles interact. That’s what clued us in to the existence of other universes. The communication involves measuring that interference.” He turned to me. “You following?”
“Barely.”
“The problem is, communication takes forever because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. We have to do statistical analysis on a long stream of data to resolve the information they send. It takes us over an hour for every bit, but the thing works. They are sending us English text with five bits per character.”