The Space_Time Displacement Conundrum

by Milo James Fowler

  "Why would a gaseous entity such as yourself need a ship? You can travel far beyond the bounds of that old flesh bag you used to lug around."

  The captain licked his lips—at least that's what he thought he was doing. It's what he would have been doing if this body that looked like his body was still in fact his body. "Very well. So now what?"

  "How's that?" The old one raised an eyebrow.

  "You've welcomed me into your tribe. I accept that. What's next?"

  "Usually we spend more time in denial at this stage of the game."

  "Usually you're not dealing with the likes of Captain Bartholomew Quasar!" He flashed a winning smile.

  "You really think a lot of yourself."

  Static hissed from the captain's collar. Cursing under his breath, he activated the device with a head jerk. "What now, Hank? Can't you see I'm in the middle of something?"

  "Uh…Captain, who are you talking to down there?"

  Quasar glanced at the wise man, leaning on his staff with mild interest. "It's a little difficult to explain." He cleared his throat. "I've been…sublimated."

  "How's that?" Hank growled.

  "I am no longer a physical being. I'm—" He frowned. "Gaseous."

  "Humph," Hank said. "Thought you'd like to know that our propulsion systems are back online. We're ready to go whenever you are."

  Captain Quasar felt a stinging sensation behind his eyes. "You'll have to go on without me, Hank ol' buddy. Where you go, I cannot follow—physically. Unless you were to rig some sort of containment field." He shook his head. "No, I'm afraid I'll have to stay here with my new friend." He leaned toward the old fellow. "What do you call yourself?"

  "We go by many names. But you can call us Steve."

  "Captain, there's nobody down there."

  "I know, Hank. I know. Maybe someday on the other side of this vast galaxy, our paths will cross again, and I'll explain everything over a cold, bubbly Thelusian Sunrise: how we trespassed into a planet's orbit we had no business intruding upon, never mind the massive amounts of quartz that could have been harvested and sold for the manufacture of haute vintage time pieces. We shouldn't have poked our noses where they didn't belong. And your intrepid captain was forced to pay the price—not that you'd ever understand a word out of me, big ball of gas that I am!"

  Hank cleared one of his throats, giving his voice that oddly harmonic quality. "Captain, I'm looking at you right now on the viewscreen. You don't appear any different to me."

  "Thanks for saying so." Quasar slapped his forehead and turned to the old man. "Look at me, Steve. I'm hallucinating."

  Steve only chuckled.

  "I think I'm actually talking to a member of my crew!"

  "You are," Hank said. "Captain, Dr. Yune thinks you may have been exposed to—"

  "Signing off now." Quasar smiled sadly as he lifted his shoulder to his chin.

  "Lapses such as these will decrease the longer you're in your new state of being," Steve said. "You're actually doing quite well, all things considered."

  The captain nodded, but he didn't agree. His bowels were swimming and a knife's blade had wedged itself between his frontal lobes. In other words, he felt like crap. "I need to sit down."

  "No, you don't," Steve chuckled. "You're noncorporeal!"

  "Be that as it may." Quasar grunted with a wince as he seated himself on an outcropping of rock. "This residual self-image needs to sit down."

  "Perhaps you'd like to test your hovering abilities?"

  "My what?"

  "It's what we gases do. We hover." He pointed with his staff to the precipice. "Go on, give it a whirl. There's nothing quite like it."

  Captain Quasar turned to gaze at the abysmal drop. "I've always wanted to fly," he admitted.

  "Of course you have. What carbon-based starship captain hasn't?"

  "I mean, as a boy." Headache abating, Quasar rose and stared, transfixed, at the fathomless gorge and the hundred meter gap to the opposite cliff side. "I used to have these dreams of floating over the heads of other kids in the schoolyard, and they'd stare up at me in awestruck wonder—"

  "Superman complex," Steve muttered as if taking note.

  "How's that?"

  "Just like Superman," Steve reiterated.

  Quasar shook his head, chuckling. "You know, I've never told anybody that before. But I feel like I've known you forever, Steve."

  "Maybe you have." The old fellow's eyes glittered at the captain's confused expression. "Time's different for you now. It passes faster in the gaseous state. What may have been only a few minutes for your corporeal self now could be days, even years."

  Captain Quasar nodded. It was all beginning to make sense, although not to him—not if he really thought about it. But that was the problem: he couldn't think. The harder he tried, the more difficult it became to remember how he'd gotten here. Had he always been here?

  Yes of course he had, with Steve and this yawning chasm before him that his toes had already breached, sending cascades of quartz sand raining into the black.

  "Why haven't I tried this before?"

  "You couldn't."

  "But now I can." Quasar's non-corporeal-but-somehow-still-corporeal chest swelled with pride. "Because now I'm gas!"

  With that, he plunged into the abyss, at first a little unsure of himself as he failed to float upward as any gas should, then ratcheting up the emotions to sheer terror as the cliff face rushed upward and he plummeted into the blinding black, screaming to his death, falling and screaming and falling some more.

  One thing was abundantly clear: he had not, in fact, sublimated into a gas. He was still very solid—and heavy.

  And he was going to meet a horrible end at the bottom of it all.

  Episode 17: Very Noble Gases

  But then he stopped falling and flailing.

  For another moment or two he kept screaming because he'd grown accustomed to the sound and, truth be told, felt a little comforted by it. But when he froze in midair, he noticed that he was floating upward, as buoyant as any gaseous entity should be, and he grinned, releasing a whoop.

  "I can fly!"

  In actuality, it was Hank at the controls of a transport pod maintaining a tractor beam's hold on the captain. Medical Officer Yune was with him, more than a little concerned about the neurological damage Quasar might have suffered. Apparently, whatever had affected him on the surface had not appeared on any toxicity scans.

  Floating in the tractor beam's grip, Quasar babbled and cooed to himself like a happy baby as he drifted into the pod's cargo hold. Yune stood inside the airlock while the hold's air was evacuated and replenished with a fresh burst from the life support reserve canisters. Then she entered the hold wearing a breather, just to be on the safe side.

  "Captain, are you all right?"

  Quasar remained on the riveted steel floor for a moment, blinking up at the ceiling. With a thoughtful frown, he rose to his feet in a single movement.

  "Yune. You're here." He glanced around the cramped quarters. "A transport pod." He patted himself down. "I'm solid." Quasar's gaze narrowed. "Where's Steve?"

  "Sir, I am afraid there may have been certain hallucinogenic properties to the quartz dust—"

  The captain pushed his way past her to where Hank navigated the pod, rocketing up through the planet's atmosphere to rejoin the Magnitude in orbit.

  "Hank, take us back down." Quasar leaned over the very hairy helmsman.

  Dr. Yune came alongside the captain and urged him to return to the hold. "Sir, you need to rest."

  "I need some answers." He reached over Hank and opened a comm channel. "Did you want me to kill myself? Is that what this was all about?"

  "Captain, there's no one out there," Yune insisted.

  "Can you hear me, Steve?" Quasar shouted.

  The viewscreen suddenly filled with the face of a bearded old man. Hank could only stare, his four hands paused at the controls. Dr. Yune blinked, lips parting without sound. The captain folded his
muscular arms and leaned back on his heels.

  "So we meet again."

  The wrinkled face chuckled. "Must say, we're impressed. Your species doesn't always look out for each other. Not that you were in any serious danger, of course, and no permanent damage was done."

  "Captain, who is this?" Yune said.

  "But all in all, we learned a great deal about you folks. And we know you'll think twice before returning to harvest our quartz deposits, as you call them." Steve chuckled. "Little chance of that now, I'm sure."

  Quasar allowed the makings of a smile to creep along his jaw line. "Then we're free to go."

  "Of course. And again, there shouldn't be any lingering effects, so you can put your mind at ease. We don't want to be known as evil or anything. Just dangerous."

  "The Noble Gases of the Epsilon Seven Star Cluster," the captain mused.

  "How about the Very Noble Gases. Has a better ring to it."

  Quasar reached to sign off.

  "And Captain," Steve said, filling the screen with his sparkly eyes. "Don't ever be afraid to share your dreams. You may think you're out here exploring the universe, but we believe you're on a journey to self-discovery. Your dreams are what make you human."

  Captain Quasar punched the comm button, and their view of the upper atmosphere returned, breaking away to reveal star-punctured black and the glorious Effervescent Magnitude, running on full power.

  "What was that all about?" Hank grumbled, visibly shaken. "Who was that guy?"

  "A mental construct." Quasar strummed his chin and stared into space.

  "Sir?" Yune touched his arm.

  "I apparently possess an inexplicable tendency to trust wise old sages with oaken staffs."

  "Humph," said Hank.

  "Before we leave orbit, remind me to post a warning buoy," Quasar said. "This planet should be left alone."

  "Understood," Hank muttered. It was standard procedure in these types of situations, after all.

  "Is everything all right, sir? You seem—" Yune searched the captain's confident gaze. "Different, somehow."

  Sublimation could do that to a man—although he seriously doubted that Steve had ever changed him into a gaseous entity. At the time, however, he hadn't known what to believe. Gas can have that effect on carbon-based, corporeal bodies, he supposed.

  Had he really thrown himself off a cliff? How absurd.

  Shaking his head, the captain had clapped Hank and Yune on the shoulders and given them a hearty squeeze. "Have I ever told you how much I've always wanted to fly?"

  Even now, Captain Quasar couldn't help smiling at the memory. But his expression quickly turned upside-down. "You tried to kill me."

  "I did no such thing." Steve's voice sounded offended in this pitch-black space-between-space and time-between-time or wherever/whenever they were right now. "We were merely testing your species, as we do with all carbon-based life forms that set foot on our planet. And as I told you at the time, you passed with flying colors."

  "And you've been with me ever since."

  "In your nasal cavity, yes. When you inhaled a little too much of our dust, you took part of us with you."

  "But you've only chosen to reveal yourself to me now. Why is that?"

  "Beats me." Steve paused. "Maybe it has something to do with that black hole you encountered."

  Quasar nodded. "I've considered that."

  "But if you don't want me hanging around, by all means, report to your medical bay and have your sinuses vacuumed. That's assuming you ever return to your ship. You may be lost in this limbo for the remainder of your conscious lifetime."

  Episode 18: Lost in Limbo

  Captain Quasar slapped himself. He pulled his hair. He kicked his own shins. But it was all to no avail. He couldn't feel a thing.

  "Well, that's limbo for you." Steve sighed as though he'd experienced it before. "Always a possibility when you're time-traveling, you know. Think of it as a pothole on your non-temporal road—but one deep enough to swallow you whole. I suppose that would be more like a sinkhole—"

  "Enough!" Quasar clenched his fists. "We're getting out of here."

  "I admire your bravado, Captain. But pardon me if I don't share your optimism. I must assume you knew what you were doing when you set your ship to auto-destruct—"

  "No—that's not what happened." Quasar shook his head. The countdown hadn't timed out, and there had been no blast. He would have remembered an explosion!

  "Face it," Steve said. "You blew up your ship, and this, apparently, is your afterlife."

  Captain Quasar ground his teeth. The thought of spending his eternal rest in this silent void with no one but a gaseous entity's hallucinogenic projection to keep him company left him in such a state of mental anguish and despair that he had no other recourse but to raise both fists into the black and shake them furiously while a strangled shriek erupted forth from his diaphragm.

  "That was uncalled for," Steve broke the awkward silence that followed.

  A sudden force exerted itself on the captain, a wrenching, pulling, twisting sensation that reached out from the impenetrable dark and seized hold of him, and with it came a wave of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, Quasar was terrified for his life, and he couldn't help but wonder if the last remnants of his self-awareness were being torn from him, leaving him as empty as a null set, as if he'd never been born. But on the other hand, he couldn't help but think of this powerful presence as a deus ex machina of sorts, saving him from this space-between-space and returning him to actual space-time.

  Quasar heard someone screaming, and it sent chills down his spine. Then he realized he was hearing himself, and that only made matters worse. A starfaring captain was above such things. He'd never made such noises before, even under extreme duress. But now he sounded like someone was pulling out his fingernails or performing open-heart surgery with a dull spoon.

  "Is something happening?" Steve sounded curious.

  "Can't you feel it?" Quasar growled in agony.

  "I'm non-corporeal, remember?"

  The captain squeezed his eyes shut—not that it made much difference here, being devoid of light and all—and surrendered to the force that tugged at his every nerve fiber. If it tore him apart, so be it. Anything to avoid spending another moment in this place!

  With a shock akin to belly-flopping into a pool from a six-foot diving board, Captain Quasar opened his eyes and let out a sharp cry, finding himself back on the bridge of the Effervescent Magnitude with all systems normal and his crew looking as surprised as he felt.

  "Hank!" The sight of the very hairy helmsman at his post brought a surge of joy.

  "Captain," the Carpethrian growled, blinking his deep-set eyes. "What happened?"

  If Hank was here, that meant Quasar was no longer in the past—and if he had returned to the present, that meant the Magnitude hadn't auto-destructed in the past. Right? They were still in one piece, obviously!

  "Report." He faced his first officer.

  Commander Wan met him with a fierce look in her eyes. "Permission to speak freely, Captain."

  He frowned. "Granted?"

  "I suggest we take the cold fusion reactor offline. We can't afford to have that happen again."

  He nodded slowly. "Right. That." What was she referring to?

  "All 1,492 crew members are present and accounted for, sir." She consulted her console. "Wherever we were—" She frowned, then swallowed. "We were there a long time."

  The reactor had gone kaput, and Quasar had found himself in the past, at the inaugural ceremony for the Magnitude's first voyage into deep space. Then he'd found himself on board that Amazonian ship, but with no idea how he'd arrived there. Hank had mentioned something about a black hole putting them all back together—

  "Give me eyes." He faced the viewscreen, and immediately an image of the swirling black hole appeared, nearly a thousand kilometers away. He blew out a sigh. "That's where we were."

  "Captain?" Hank half-turned toward h
im with a quizzical look.

  "Somehow. Some way. How else would you explain it? We're all back, all in one piece." He glanced at Wan. "How long did you say?"

  "Five hundred years, sir."

  Quasar collapsed into his chair. "Wha-haa?"

  Hank cleared one of his throats. "There is an unidentified vessel approaching, Captain. Well-armed. They're on an intercept course."

  As far as Quasar could tell, the Magnitude wasn't moving. He shut his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Five centuries. You're sure about that?"

  Commander Wan nodded, looking like a pale ghost of her usual confident self. "According to the chronometer, that's how long we were—"

  "In limbo." Quasar ran his hands down his face, his jaw sagging in disbelief. "How is that even possible?"

  Hank shrugged his superior set of shoulders. "How are we even alive?"

  Cold fusion reactors. Black holes. Limbo. Time travel. What was this, science fiction? Captain Quasar had to take command of the situation. He composed himself and nodded to Lieutenant Davis.

  "Hail them, whoever they are." But in his gut, he had a sinking feeling he already knew.

  Episode 19: Seen and Heard

  The Amazonian vessel was as domineering as the captain remembered, a massive star cruiser with bulky engines, weapons arrays, and a prominent concave dish on the bow where its tractor beam was housed. Technically, he was in the past, for he had already escaped from the Amazon women and left Asteria madder than a dry Thelusian mudhog, yet he had no memory of this space-time. He wasn't living in the moment alongside his younger self, sharing the same brain pan, as he had at the Magnitude's inaugural ceremony on Earth. Now he was living this moment for the very first time.

  "We have no record of this vessel, sir," Commander Wan reported.

  Quasar set his jaw. Apparently, he was the only one on board who could identify the ship. Even Hank didn't show a flicker of recognition. "This is Captain Bartholomew Quasar of the—"

  A full-frame image of a brawny, dark-haired, green-eyed woman consumed the viewscreen, her large, white teeth—as bright as the captain's own—bared with irritation. "Who are you to speak to me?" her voice boomed, and Quasar recognized it instantly. She was Asteria's commanding officer. The last time he'd seen her, she'd been wearing a pressure suit and pounding furiously against the door of that cargo hold Asteria had locked her in. "We demand to know what you are doing in Amazonian space!"