by Nate Johnson
Things felt a little wobbly as he fought to get oxygen back into his blood stream.
“What is going on?” Doctor Simpson said as she came up behind Amanda.
“Electrical fire,” Nick said as he brought his hand up under his armpit to try and staunch the burning pain.
“Let me see that,” Amanda said as she gently pulled his hand out for her to examine. She winced when she saw the blisters starting to pop up on the palm of his hand.
He really should have thought things through before using his bare hand to grab that kill switch.
She shook her head and looked up at him, “You couldn’t wait to get some gloves?”
He smiled down at her, “I thought you got squeamish around blood.”
She continued to examine his hand. “Blood yes, blisters not so much. Come on, let me look at this,” she said as she started to pull him towards her cabin.
“Keep everyone out of there,” Nick said to Doctor Simpson. “I need to find the electrical short.”
Amanda tugged on his arm and said, “Come on, you can fix it later.”
He smiled to himself and let her lead him to her cabin.
Her room was exactly as he had pictured it. A bunk next to the far wall. A big comfortable chair that begged to be sat in. A small table with a lamp. The perfect set up for a quiet afternoon of reading.
A shelf above the bed with old-fashioned paper books confirmed his impression.
Nick leaned over and quickly examined the books. He was impressed. Amanda had a wide taste. Everything from classic science fiction to modern day thrillers with a couple of well-worn romance novels.
“What? No textbooks?” he asked.
“Textbooks I use, those I love,” she said over her shoulder as she pulled a first aid kit out from a drawer under her bunk.
He smiled to himself. Yes, most definitely, a very interesting woman.
“Here, let me look at your hand,” she said with a serious tone.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “The Nanos will fix it.”
She slowly shook her head, “You don’t have time to wait for the Nanos, remember? You have an engine to fix if you’re going to keep us up here.”
He laughed, “A couple of blisters aren’t going to stop me. It’s not like I’m performing brain surgery.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said with a deep frown. “You are too important to let yourself get hurt like this. You should have waited. We have proper firefighting equipment.”
He shrugged. “I knew it was a class Charlie fire, an electrical fire. The smell of burning wire insulation. Nothing smells like that.”
“Yes, well, next time, wait.”
He smiled at her obvious concern until she poured a clear liquid on his hand that made him want to crawl out of his skin, the pain radiating up and down his arm.
“What was that?” he yelled.
“Quit whining and come here,” she said as she pulled him to the bathroom to wash his hand in the sink.
“Yes ma’am,” he muttered.
Once she had cleaned his hand, she gently pushed him into that comfortable chair of hers and started wrapping his hand in white gauze.
He leaned back and let the adrenaline flushing through his system work itself out.
Staring down at his hand, she paused for a moment and asked, “What going on? I though the ship’s AI was supposed to stop things like this from happening.”
He nodded. “It is, that’s why I told Doctor Simpson to keep everyone out of that room. I want to take a look at things. Too many strange things are going on. The engine shouldn’t have been allowed to fail. Even with the Engineer gone, it should have lasted a lot longer than it did. Now this fire, and someone has been tampering with the CO2 scrubbers.
Their eyes met as they both contemplated the seriousness of what he was saying.
“How can you be sure it’s not me?” she asked.
He laughed. “If you wanted to sabotage things, you wouldn’t use mechanical systems.”
“What?” she asked as she pulled the bandage tight. “You don’t think I’m smart enough.”
He winced and quickly shook his head. “No, just that you would have tried the social aspects of things. We are naturally drawn to use our strengths.”
Amanda looked at him for a log moment then tied off the white gauze and turned away.
“What about Doctor Simson, if she did it then why would she not hide the evidence?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “But the absence of evidence can be as damning as evidence.”
She frowned and shook her head. Nick smiled to himself. She really was pretty when she frowned, a rarity that he found very intriguing.
“Come on,” he said, “the room should be purged of smoke by now.”
Unfortunately, when he examined the room, he could find no tampering. Nothing that would indicate anyone had done anything wrong. Of course, the transfer box was a black melted mess. Any evidence could easily have been destroyed in the fire.
But, in his gut, he knew something wasn’t right. Too many things were going wrong. Too many problems in too short a period.
And there were only two suspects.
But why? he wondered. What was the motive? There were easier ways to commit suicide. Especially on a spacecraft. Hell, push the wrong button, and a person would find themselves breathing vacuum. Why take everyone with them? It just didn’t make sense.
Over the next few days, Nick concentrated on finishing the engine. But, even as he worked, he couldn’t fully forget about the planet below.
His mind often wandered to the scenes played out on the monitors in Amanda’s office. At the end of each day, when he could no longer work bent over the engine, he would find himself quickly cleaning up then hurrying to her rooms to watch the screens.
She would always greet him with a quick smile then point to the most interesting scene. A woman cooking. A group of men discussing the weather. A child rolling a wooden ball across the hard floor of his mother’s kitchen.
Domestic tranquility, he thought. A paradise of the simple life, free of stress and tribulations.
For some reason, he didn’t believe it, not fully. The weapons stacked in the corner, the old man with the missing arm. The woman who glanced at the sky and shivered every time she stepped outside. There were too many examples that said things were not always what they seemed.
Finally, on the fourth day, he was almost finished with the engine when the hatch opened, and Amanda stepped in with a plate of food.
“You missed lunch,” she said with a disapproving shake of her head.
He laughed, “I’m almost done. We can start testing it later this afternoon.”
Wiping his hands on a rag, he accepted the plate and watched as she sat down, her legs hanging over the edge of the decking and into the engine well like his.
“You are ahead of schedule,” she said with a smile.
“Yes, well ... I’ve got a junction box that needs to be rewired and a dozen other things that need to be fixed. Anything new?” he asked as he took a bite of his sandwich.
She knew he was asking about the Eundai.
“Yes, in fact, something occurred to me today. I’ve been watching them for nine months, and I realized something that I should have noticed long ago.”
“Whaaaatsss thast,” he said around a mouth full of food.
“Pets,” she said. “They don’t have pets.”
He stopped eating for a moment and raised an eyebrow.
She smiled at him. “It’s a simple thing, but really, so different. In human societies, in almost every culture, there are pets of some kind of another. Dogs, cats, birds, fish. Something. But here, there is no equivalent.”
“Why?” he asked as he took another bite. Keep her talking he thought. He liked to hear her discuss the Eundai. Her observations and theories fascinated him. She talked about them like he talked about engines. They just had a great deal more moving parts.
He laughed, “Maybe that we enjoy dominating other species.”
“Or,” she said with a frown, “we have more love than we know what to do with.”
“Maybe,” he answered as he finished his first sandwich. Obviously, Miss Rogers hadn’t seen the same side of the galaxy as he had. From his experience, an excess of love and kindness was not the case.
“How’d you get this job?” he asked her before he could stop himself. It had been one of those nagging thoughts that had been bothering him for days. Both of the other scientists were full on experts in their field. Not grad students working on a research project.
She balked for a moment, and her face grew pale. He was surprised, he hadn’t expected to shock her with his question.
“Excuse me,” he said, “It’s none of my business, just a curiosity, not a big deal.”
“No, No,” she said. “Perfectly understandable. Normally, an expert, a distinguished scholar with years of experience would be here. Or at least most people would think so. That is one of my worries. One of many. What if people don’t take me seriously? What if they don’t believe my theories because I don’t have my Doctorate?”
“Then they are idiots,” Nick said with a quick shrug of his shoulders. Anyone who didn’t believe her didn’t know her. It was as simple as that from his perspective.
She smiled at him and shook her head, “You don’t know the academic world. I swear, the political infighting has to be worse than the Imperial Court.”
“Oh, so you have a lot of experience with the Imperial Court then?” he asked as a joke. Or at least he thought it was a joke until he saw her face grow white and freeze for just a moment.
Her expression became lost for a second then quickly came back to normal as she got up from the deck.
“I must get back to work,” she said as she wiped off the back of her suit. “Grundal is teaching Gryopic archery this afternoon, I don’t want to miss that.”
He nodded slowly as he frantically tried to understand what he had done to upset her so much.
“I will tell Doctor Simpson that you will want to start testing soon,” she continued, “and, don’t be late for dinner, Professor Robinson wants to discuss something.”
Nick watched her scurry from the room like a New Kansas fox. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
Shaking his head, he returned to finish the engine, but the faint whiff of Valerian star fruit pulled him back to the woman who had just left. It was enough to make a man pause and wonder about life and the future and why she hadn’t answered the question.
Chapter Six
Nick leaned back in his chair and watched the screen. I can afford a few hours, he thought. I’ve just spent nine days bringing this ship up to spec. I deserve it.
Gryopic, the Headman’s son, was trying to carve a long piece of wood into a point. His father had given him a small metal knife the day before. Even for an outsider like Nick, he could tell the boy had been thrilled. As any boy that age would have been after receiving his first knife.
The Eundai were strange yet familiar. Some things made perfect sense, while others were unfathomable.
He had learned that they were made up of two genders like most of the galaxy’s higher life forms. The bigger, darker males, the smaller females. Babies were born alive, both parents fed the newborns by regurgitating a mush like substance.
A fact that had seriously grossed him out the first time he saw it.
Each family slept together in one room. Young children, parents, and even older adult children until they left to start families of their own.
Even the Headman’s family slept in one room. It wasn’t a matter of resources or space, but a culture choice.
Almost all of the domesticated animals were reptilian in nature with scaly, segmented skin. Some obvious beasts of burden, others meat animals, and one that frequently shed its skin only to have it quickly harvested and used later to make the Eundai’s simple clothes.
Shifting the screen to another room. He watched two young children, a girl and a boy work on their letters. The Eundai’s alphabet was a simple combination of dots and lines in an invisible square. The first letter was a single dot in the lower left corner. The second letter two dots, the third three, and the fourth, a single line instead of four dots.
Four rows, for sixteen possible combinations.
As he watched, each child would write out a letter on a chalk slate, then wipe it clean and do the next letter in the alphabet. Once they had finished all sixteen letters, they would start again.
The young girl suddenly reached over and punched the boy in the shoulder. She smiled at his cry of indignation.
Nick had quickly learned the body language and facial expressions of the Eundai, they weren’t complicated. A person who spent hours watching them couldn’t fail to pick up the nuances.
The sight of the two children doing their homework made Nick smile, he could remember doing the same boring tasks at his mother’s kitchen table.
It was nice to see that some things were constant throughout the galaxy.
“What do you think?” Amanda asked from the back of the room.
“About what?”
“About them, the Eundai, everything. You have spent hours watching them. Every free minute you weren’t fixing any of a dozen things wrong with the ship. What do you think, what are your impressions?”
He turned to look at her. Her eyes were narrowed in obvious curiosity. After almost two weeks together, he had come to learn her nuances as well. In fact, he lay awake at night thinking about them.
A faint whiff of Valerian star fruit pulled at his senses, and he had to force his mind to focus on her question.
Shrugging his shoulders, he said, “You’re the expert.”
“I know, but I am curious as to what you think?”
He thought for a moment, then smiled. “I think they are screwed. Once we humans arrive, their world is going to change. Some for the better, and some for the worse. But whatever happens, it will be different.”
“Maybe we won’t interfere. Maybe the government will decide to only observe and keep its distance.”
Nick laughed and shook his head. “Can you tell me one time in human history when we have ever done that? Held back a new discovery? Kept a secret like this? It always gets out. And if it isn’t the government it will be someone else. Nope, we will never be able to put this knowledge away and ignore it. It’s not in our nature.”
Amanda frowned, and he knew that she was thinking he might be right and the thought disturbed her deeply.
“But, I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ve screwed up so many places, maybe we will have learned from our mistakes and keep the chaos to a minimum.”
“But? Do we have the right to change their world?”
“Do we have the right not to?” he answered.
“What do you mean? of course we do,” she said, her voice rising with the passion for the subject.
“Really?” he asked. “If you were in a primitive culture, and your baby was dying of a disease that a modern culture could cure. Would you want them to intervene? Or stay away out of some fear of changing things. You’d be begging for change.”
Her eyes narrowed as she considered his words.
“Think about all those people on ancient earth,” he continued. “Looking up at the stars and wondering if there was other life out there. Wouldn’t you want to know? Think of the pleasures we could give them, the vids, the books, the music. Think of improvements in agriculture we could make. Instead of ninety percent of their population toiling in the fields. We could free up resources for art, education, the sciences. Within a few generations, we could have these creatures in t
he modern age, reaching for the stars.”
“Yes,” she said with a frown, “but, that wouldn’t be right.”
He shrugged, “I don’t know. If that was me down there, plowing that field for the forty-eighth straight day. My back aching, my feet screaming. I’d be praying to the gods for someone to come rescue me.”
She slowly shook her head, unable to agree with him.
“You told me yourself,” he continued. “Their infant mortality rate is almost fifty percent and the maternity mortality rate almost ten percent. Think about it, if you were down there, and someone could change those odds. Wouldn’t you grab the chance?”
Again she slowly shook her head, but he could see a small window of doubt in her eyes.
“But think about it. The pure chance that had to occur for this life to come about,” she said. “The planet had to have an iron core to generate a protective electromagnetic barrier against the star’s radiation. It needed to be big enough to hold an atmosphere but not so big that it crushed any life before it could form.
He smiled to himself at her obvious passion.
“It had to have just the right amount of oxygen for fire to work. Without fire, no technology, no growth of intelligence. It had to have enough moisture in the air to grow plants. A dozen different things had to line up just right for a species to get this far in development. How can we just butt in and assume we can make things better?”
“I don’t know the answer,” he said. “I’m just pointing out the other side of the argument. I do know that not contacting them will have consequences.”
“Yes, but will it make them happier?” Amanda said with a scowl. “Some of the richest people aren’t happy.”
He laughed. “Amanda, there is a huge difference between being not happy, and being miserable. Believe me, I’ll take ‘not happy’ over a short, miserable life led in ignorance and fear.”
A dull beep on his monitor pulled his attention away from Amanda.
Doctor Simpson appeared in the corner of his screen and said, “Petty Officer Barns, Amanda, will you please come to the bridge, we have a problem.”
His gut pulled up tight, the woman did not look pleased. In fact, her scowl would have made Captain Jarvis proud.