by John Jakes
What made the experience even more surreal was that the soundtrack, with only a few accidental exceptions, had nothing to do with the images. As he watched the visual stew, Davidson heard an urgent, desperate-sounding radio announcement in what he thought was Korean; choppy electronic blurts from long-disconnected cell phone conversations; equally fragmentary bits from a time when airplanes were guided by men who sat in towers and actually spoke with pilots, which segued jerkily into a ten-second slice of some PBS program about the history of communication.
And a hundred more. It was as if every sound and image from the entire history of human broadcasting had been compressed into one infinite blurt of information. It made Davidson’s head spin. He grasped for reality, finally found it by reading the date running along the bottom of the screen: 02-07-2029. Today’s date. The real time in the real world…
Hansen stared at the screen. “It’s sucking up satellite relays, cell phone conversations, TV broadcasts, every electronic communication from Earth… from all time.”
Hansen sounded a little awed at the notion, Davidson thought. Well, why not? It was a little awesome. It was also a little weird and funny, and as usual, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut about that, either. “Ten billion channels and nothing to watch,” Davidson said.
What he was seeing on the screen and the aural scraps he was hearing didn’t really do justice to the overwhelming wash of electronically frozen data that was assaulting the Oberon. But there were electronic counters on the sides of the digital screen, far faster and more sensitive than anything a human possessed naturally, and they were going crazy in their own digital version of polynomial overload; occasionally the readouts would pause just long enough for Davidson to see a number that looked impossibly large—until the next pause, and an even larger number.
The ship shuddered, as if some giant invisible hand had picked it up and shaken it. The huge screen went dark for an instant, then flickered back on as everybody caught his balance. Davidson realized his heart was thundering, and from looking at the expressions on others’ faces, he knew he wasn’t the only one.
Major Cooper said nervously, “It sure knows how to get your attention.”
For himself, Davidson was giving some seriously concentrated thought to what sort of forces it took to boot a ship as big as the Oberon around like a hockey puck made of Silly Putty… and not liking much what he was coming up with.
Commander Vasich didn’t look any happier with his own thoughts than Davidson felt with his, but at least Vasich seemed to have made up his mind. The commander looked at Davidson and said, “Let’s get to work. We’ll start with a pass through the core. Take initial radiation and gamma ray readings.”
Davidson raised his head, but before he could open his mouth to speak, Vasich brusquely cut him off. “Get your monkey ready,” he said.
Davidson wanted to tell him that the order sounded like the tagline to a dirty joke, but decided that probably wouldn’t help his case any. Instead, he said, “Sir, this is a waste of time.”
Vasich eyed him coldly. “We have standard procedures.”
Davidson overrode him. “And by the time you go through all of them, it could be gone.”
But Vasich was no dummy. He could read Davidson’s mind—at least on this issue—just about as well as Davidson could himself. Not that he liked the message he found there…
“No manned flights!” he said, shaking his head. “First we send out an ape, then if it’s safe we send a pilot. In that order!”
“Let me do my job,” Davidson replied heatedly. “You need somebody out there who can think, remember that?”
Vasich’s sour expression showed what he thought about that recommendation.
Undeterred, Davidson plowed on: “You need me.”
“The monkey’s the canary,” Vasich replied. He gestured at the maelstrom on the big screen. “That’s the coal mine. Alpha pod deploys at sixteen hundred hours.”
Which pretty much ended the discussion, whether Davidson liked it or not. As a matter of fact, he didn’t like it at all…
* * *
The Oberon’s pod launch platform was a busy place. Colonel Alexander and her crew scurried about, providing backup and support to Davidson as he worked to secure Pericles in the Alpha pod. Despite working hard to conceal his own misgivings, Davidson could see, from the way the chimp’s large brown eyes darted nervously back and forth, that Pericles was picking up on his own bad vibes. He gave Pericles’s flight suit one last careful inspection, hoping the extra attention would reassure the chimp and calm him down. It was bad enough sending a monkey out to do a man’s job; far worse to send out a monkey too upset to function as well as he was able. The prospect of that made Davidson think uncomfortably of murdering a blameless animal, though Pericles was far more than any normal animal. At the bottom of things, Davidson was just plain worried about Pericles.
“Just follow your sequence and then come home,” he urged the chimp. He leaned closer, looked deep into the monkey’s eyes, and said with subdued emphasis: “You understand? Home…”
He could see that Pericles was picking up on his own unease, but the chimp was gutsy as hell, in his own simian way. Nevertheless, as the crew finished up and pulled back from the pod, Pericles looked up at Davidson and let out a long, plaintive sound—he couldn’t speak in any human tongue, but to someone who knew him well—like Davidson—the meaning was plain.
Davidson stepped back from the pod, grinned reassuringly at Pericles, then slowly, firmly, gave him the thumbs-up sign. Pericles stared at the gesture, then looked down at his own elongated fingers, deep in thought. Finally he touched his own thumb, uttered another plaintive sound, and raised it to Davidson.
Then they shut the pod door on him, and that was the last Davidson saw of him.
Good luck, you poor sonofabitch, he thought. Good luck…
* * *
The flight control deck thrummed with tension. Davidson was huddled with his boss, Commander Yasich. Gathered around Colonel Alexander and Major Santos, the rest of the team conversed in hushed tones as everybody kept an eye on the telltales, the readouts, and the big digital screen overhead. Davidson was plugged into his own headset, listening to an aural soup of technobabble, data that even he barely listened to anymore. Above him a stomach-churning wash of color ebbed and flowed across the screen.
Commander Vasich turned, looked up at the board, suddenly went rigid with concentration. Davidson followed the direction of his gaze just in time to see the course of Pericles’s Alpha pod tracing a path across the maelstrom, a scribble of bright color against a stormy digital sea. The pod itself was a gleaming point of light heading toward the darkly burning heart of the energy fields. Davidson watched the mote crawl deeper and deeper into the info-cluster, remembering how Pericles had been in the training pods—and how a few curveballs during the mission mockup had confused him, frustrated him, finally disabled him. And then he thought about Pericles replaying exactly the same thing, except this time it was for real, and Davidson knew even he wouldn’t be able to anticipate all the curveballs likely to come whizzing his way, aimed right at his head.
Damn it, I’m the one who should be out there…
Just as the thought seared his mind, the screen punched in closer and the Alpha pod began to flicker. Davidson was afraid he knew what that meant, but before he could say anything, Colonel Alexander, her own worries plain on her face, leaned forward and said, “What’s wrong?”
“He’s off course,” Davidson replied, and watched her face change.
But not Vasich. His face might as well have been carved from the same block of ice as his voice, as calm and without emotion as a winter snowbank.
“Lock on him,” Vasich said.
Davidson reached across his control board, found a red lever, pushed it forward. By now everybody knew that things were no longer going according to the script, but nobody yet had any hint just how bad things could get. Davidson was starting to get an idea, tho
ugh. He looked over at Vasich.
“He’s not responding.”
Colonel Alexander, in full alarm mode, was now personally monitoring her own team’s boards. “Surge in the heart rate,” she rapped out. “He’s scared.”
All her monitor lights flashed bright, then went dead.
Everybody stared.
Oh Jesus, Pericles… Davidson thought.
“Light him up again,” Vasich barked.
Davidson punched a rapid series of keys on his board, did it again. Nothing. “I can’t…”
The command deck exploded in frantic activity as everybody struggled to learn what had happened, to regain contact with Pericles. Everybody was so busy that only a few happened to be looking at the big screen at precisely the moment that the flickering dot representing the location of Pericles’s pod vanished.
“Jesus… he’s gone,” Davidson said, shocked.
Alexander looked up, glared. “He’s trained to come back to the Oberon.”
“If he’s alive…” Santos added.
The knowledge was in all their faces. Vasich was unnaturally calm, Alexander trying to keep her worry under control, Santos and the others tightly wrapped but looking as if their fear might break loose at any second.
Davidson gritted his teeth. If they’d sent me in the first place, none of this would be happening. He turned toward Commander Vasich. “I’m waiting for orders, sir.”
If Vasich could hear the contempt lurking just beneath the surface of Davidson’s words, he gave no sign. “We’ll just sit tight for now. And wait.”
No, Davidson thought. He was so angry, so frustrated, that he barely trusted himself to speak. He slid from his seat, stood, looked at Vasich, and said, “I’m going to run some sequences in Delta pod. See if I can figure out what he did wrong.” What we did wrong, that’s the real question.
Vasich didn’t say anything. He just watched Davidson stalk off the deck, then turned back to his own board, a patient, quiet, cold man, suddenly in far over his head.
* * *
Back on the launch deck, Davidson, in full flight uniform and helmet, slid into the command seat of the Delta pod, settled himself, and waited until the pounding ache in his chest began to lessen a little. As the pressure in his skull subsided, he began to listen to the scratchy, half-panicked chatter running across the flight deck control network that was plugged into his speakers.
He closed his eyes, then opened them and stared out through the pod’s hatch at the immensity of space that surrounded the Oberon. By human standards, the vessel was huge. But here, spinning slowly in the diamond-velvet darkness, it was a speck, a mote, an insignificant afterthought in the consciousness of the universe.
I wonder, Davidson thought slowly as he stared at the stars, if there’s really that much of a difference between Pericles and me. On the galactic scale of things…
He pushed the thought away. Mysticism had never been his strong suit. He was a man, Pericles was a monkey, and he had a job to do. The question would be whether Commander Vasich, with his by-the-book devotion to orders, would let him get that job done.
He switched on all the pod’s systems, waited until the main screen lit up, and then began to run a series of flight simulations, variations on all the possible courses Pericles’s Alpha pod might have somehow blundered into. The more he worked, the more depressed he grew. Vasich and the others might be worrying about the monkey wandering off course, but Davidson knew in his bones that wasn’t what had happened. Something out there, something from the vastness of the universe that neither monkey nor man knew about, had jumped out of the shadows and taken the chimp. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did. The problem would be convincing Vasich, and also convincing the tight-assed commander to let him do something about it. For an instant, he felt an overwhelming flash of worry about Pericles. In his own way, he loved the chimp as much as he would any fellow human pilot.
Just as he began to muse about what he might actually do about the situation, Vasich’s voice cut through the babble washing into his ears.
“Okay…” Vasich said. “That’s it. We lost him.”
Not yet, we haven’t, Davidson thought. He took a deep breath, then began to run his fingers across the pod’s control panel as he watched the telltales light up in response.
Frank Santos’s voice interrupted: “Want to send another chimp?”
Davidson’s fingers stopped moving for a moment as he waited for Vasich’s reply. It came an instant later.
“No, it’s too dangerous. Shut it down.”
About what I expected out of you…
Davidson took another deep breath, and lifted his hands from the controls. He swung his pilot’s chair into the command position, felt it lock in with a solid metallic clunk.
Now for the tricky part.
He reached over, groped for Delta pod’s door lock, found it. Punched lock. Slowly, hissing, the door swung shut. Davidson checked his flight helmet, then keyed up the pod’s control panel to full active-launch status. He closed his eyes, leaned back in the pilot’s chair, gathered himself.
Hang on, Pericles. I’m coming…
* * *
With the gloom of Commander Vasich’s last words ordering the abandonment of their mission still hanging in the silent air, the command deck was a depressing place. Only Vasich seemed to be concentrating on what was left of the mission. The others stared blankly at nothing, or busied themselves with useless maintenance tasks, anything to take their minds off the meaning of their failure. Of Pericles’s failure.
So it was Vasich who noticed the anomaly first. He stared at the main screen, at the readouts, and at first he couldn’t believe his own eyes. Equipment malfunction? No, there was confirmation coming in. There was no way that all the systems could be whacking out at the same time.
Hansen blinked, turned, astonished. “Sir, Delta pod has launched,” he said.
They all clustered together, pretending that the launch was a huge mystery, while Vasich ran the controls like a robot. But it was no mystery. They all knew.
What they didn’t know was why Davidson had done it. Or what to do next.
* * *
Davidson knew. He just didn’t know how it would turn out. As he was now realizing while he pulled on his flight gloves and then continued entering the codes and courses he knew so well into the pod’s control panel. Outside the pod, the vast, gleaming bulk of the Oberon slid slowly past, his minnow gliding past the hulking whale.
It’ll take old iron-ass about thirty seconds to figure out I actually disobeyed him, and then…
He grinned as Vasich’s voice suddenly grated in his ears.
“Delta pod, your flight is not authorized. Repeat, your flight is not authorized.”
No shit, Sherlock.
Davidson made a few final adjustments to the controls, and watched as Delta pod began to track a wide, elliptical trajectory away from the Oberon toward the roiling heart of the vast electronic cloud that had swallowed Pericles and the Alpha pod. He knew that Oberon’s bridge could track him as easily as he could himself. They knew what he was doing. Nonetheless, he couldn’t stop himself from telling Vasich what he’d been thinking all along: “Never send a monkey to do a man’s job,” he replied.
Vasich’s voice sounded like he’d just swallowed a road grader. “I swear you’ll never fly again.”
Davidson shrugged. “But I’m sure as hell flying now.”
Put that in your tailpipe and smoke it…
On the Oberon’s flight deck, Vasich listened to Davidson’s sally with the expression of a man who’d just discovered his toilet paper was made out of steel wool.
Specialist Hansen, the only one who still seemed to be keeping up with the standard operations routines, checked the big screen and swallowed hard.
Vasich looked at Hansen, then up at the screen. Something blinking there…
Hansen said, “I’m getting a Mayday, sir. Jesus! It’s on our secure channel!”
“Alpha pod?” Frank Santos cut in.
Hansen looked at the screen, then at his controls and readouts, then back at the screen. Obviously flummoxed, he said, “I… don’t know. But it’s coming on strong.”
Vasich could see that for himself. But without knowing which pod had activated its beacon, he had no way to evaluate the situation, let alone decide on a proper course of action.
“Put it up,” he told Hansen brusquely. They had the capability to parse the beacon’s entire data stream and put the digitized result on the main screen. Maybe that would tell him something.
Hansen complied immediately. The screen jittered, shifted, then adjusted to the new data flows and abruptly cleared of static. They saw bits and pieces, flashes of faces and shapes, but so fogged by visual interference it was impossible to make out exactly who, or what, they were.
But the sound was like everything else they’d heard from the heart of the digital cloud: unsynchronized, scratched with static, nearly random. A babble. A tower of digital Babel.
“Help us… Massive turbulence. Request instructions…”
Vasich stared, bug-eyed with shock. He looked slowly about the bridge, saw the same incomprehension smeared on every other face.
Vasich lunged for the radio controls, slammed open a link, and shouted, “Delta pod! Abort mission! Repeat, Delta pod. Return to ship!”
No answer, just hissing static.
Vasich listened hopelessly to the sound of his words emptying into the vast, whispering silence of the universe.
* * *
In the cramped command module of Delta pod, Davidson was no longer paying attention to anything coming from Vasich or the Oberon. He had his own problems.
On his screen, he’d thrown up the last course Pericles had followed in Alpha pod, at least the best approximation of that course his computer could come up with and was trying to match it with seat-of-the-pants flying. It was no easy task, not with the interference he was getting.
Vasich’s final cry vanished into a rising tide of static. Concentrating on his own screens, he had only a fragment of attention left over for the larger region through which he flew. But he was a pilot, and possessed the sixth sense all pilots had when it came to danger and his own safety.