Rillas and Other Science Fiction Stories. A. R. Morlan
Reba my answer, she began crooking her right index finger at me, inviting me to sit with her, while unfastening her tunic top with the other hand....
Day 129:
I think I’m doing better. I only lost one day this spell, and I was still dimly aware. The blackouts seem to go in cycles, a converging series of alternate mad and lucid spells. I think the convergence is the most reassuring thing of all. Yesterday’s spell of madness was nothing like the fifty-seven days that passed without knowing between that day we ran out of food, and the day I began this log a second time.
As it turned out, I did go along, as Reba’s guest, but I never did get around to faxing an order for a month’s supply of Nurtaform to my bosses at the Escondido Linear Accelerator; not that there wasn’t the time to do so, but Reba insisted on hurrying me onto the ship before the others settled in, as if my long-term presence prior to lift-off would assure me future acceptance during my ride on the government-sponsored trip. At least that’s what I thought, initially; but after we’d been through the first of our hyperjumps; I got to wondering if Reba didn’t want me along for the thrill of it. She could stay in esper contact with her crewmates; mentally holding everyone’s hand—while she had me wrapped up in her, surrounded by her enveloping soft body. Like doing something dirty under the table during a formal, tablecloths and best-china luncheon. A typical Reba trick, but God help me, I loved it. Even though I had to rely on my training to prevent my mind from crumbling under the weight of the crushing claustrophobia that ensued during a nightmare run through a wormhole, everything shifting from blue to red as we thumbed our noses at Einstein and his contemporaries.
And when we weren’t making jumps (too many of them spaced too close together put a strain on the ship), Reba spent every available free moment with me, telling me about the mission—the ship would stop off at five different planets, in a total of three systems, studying each of the test planets (all close to earth-type, with similar geophysical make-up) to determine how best to adapt earth-type plants and animals to them, with an eye toward future human colonization. “Something like Johnny Appleseed,” Reba had gushed on the morning of the day that everything went wrong, “only instead of apple seeds we’ll be leaving seedlings of dozens of kinds of foodstuffs, and also leave behind pairs of small animals—”
“We don’t qualify?” I asked her with a straight face; Reba and I were both under five foot five, and redheaded, with freckles. One of our professors at the university used to call us the Bobbsey Twins, whoever they were. (The professor was old; he remembered a childhood when television was almost non-existent....)
Reba started to punch me lightly on the forearm, saying, “You non-espers are all alike—” when the ship shuddered, and the pseudo-gravity a shade over half that of earth’s under the best of conditions became non-gravity. Luckily, Reba and I were still dressed; we lurched out of my cabin and into the circular hallway, alternately grabbing and releasing the flap-like hand-holds positioned around the walls for times of weightlessness—a few times I almost missed grabbing the next hand-hold, and almost went spinning off into the air.
The others were likewise making their way to the centrally located navigation hub, launching with their hands to keep from hitting the walls, bypassing the flaps all together, in their haste to discover the source of the problem.
What was so eerie for me was that no one spoke; all I saw were wrinkled brows and darting eyes. I asked Reba what was wrong; she only shook her head as she propelled herself into the control area. After a few seconds, as I watched Neil and his navigator Jimmie (he was a double-duty crewman) frantically—albeit silently—trying to regain manual control of the engines, I noticed something so obvious apparently no one had seen it, something very wrong—the engine console was dark. Then, the first sound I’d heard since the ship lost gravity:
“I think...we came too close to something.” That was Neil, his voice tight and strained. Immediately, Jimmie countered from behind his controls, “No way...structure probably gave way enough for the engines to disconnect, ’sides, the alarms didn’t go off—”
“I believe Neil may be right....” Elizabeth’s voice trailed off ominously, her brogue a lilting whisper of doom as she keyed up the rear viewer. “Alarm or no alarms, there’s the evidence.” We floated toward her, hair and arms waving gently in the non-gravity, as we took a look at what she’d keyed up: The strangely enveloping blackness of hyperspace was gone. And in its place, the normality of a sky filled with a thick dusting of stars—and the startling strangeness of a rapidly receding, dangerous pure black spot blotting out the stars to the rear.
“What is it, Elizabeth?” Reba whispered.
“Look in the viewer,” she replied, her lips brushing against the dark hair swimming slowly in front of her face, “The gravitational vectors....” I now realized what she was implying, but it was almost inconceivable, so slight was the possibility of coming so close to the gravitational field of a super-dense star. I spoke through lips almost glued shut with fear, “Our vectors must’ve grazed a black hole, knocking us into normal space-time.” All of us must’ve realized that the collision avoidance system didn’t have the range to avoid those freak fields—the simplest of classical mechanics made it so. The gravitational pull increased only as the mass of the star, but its strength fell off as the square of the distance. The result was a gravitational vector that shot up frighteningly fast. By the time the system had time to react, vectors had already collapsed our field.
My legs were shaking in mid-float. If only we’d passed a little closer to the black hole, if only we’d lost a little more velocity, it would’ve already swallowed us, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
“It’s impossible,” Huoy frowned, “The chances of passing something like that in all this emptiness....”
“You fool!” Elizabeth hissed, “Look at the screen, woman! Improbable doesn’t mean ‘impossible’—there it is.”
“Look, let’s check out what we can, all right?” I asked, hoping to avoid one of those eye-bulging, throat-straining esper fights; apparently, the others were anxious to avoid one too, for we broke into teams, and began looking for every possible reason for the engines to have failed, starting with the in-ship circuits, and finally finishing with my offer to suit up and help Jimmie check the engines from outside the ship.
But what we found out there made me immediately regret my efforts to prevent Huoy and Elizabeth from engaging in another esper-argument...and for once, I didn’t mind being the odd-man out when Jimmie opted not to say anything as we neared the ship’s engine...and saw that the field antennae, the gravitation generators, conversion units and the radioactive ports were gone. Sliced clean off the ship, as if God himself had just reached out and snatched them off, leaving a void in the ship’s warp drive nacelles.
The only sound I could hear over the two-way radio connecting Jimmie and myself was his sob-like breathing, each breath coming in a painful hitch, only to be expelled in a mournful rush of air....
And because Jimmie’s esper abilities linked him with his fellow crewmen, he felt no need to speak to me, either...as it was, I had to humble myself and ask Neil what he thought might have happened once Jimmie and I re-entered the ship...not that I hadn’t had the time to consider the options myself. But actually hearing them from Neil’s lips did give me some small measure of cold comfort:
“I think in-homogeneities in the collapsing graviton field took our engines, or most of ’em, I guess. The theory predicted it could happen, but it’s never been done, as far as I know. But then, I suppose the test engineers didn’t have enough black holes nearby to test those particular conditions, did they?” I appreciated his slight attempt at humor, even if some of the others frowned. He went on, “In normal gravitational gradients, fields have always dropped evenly when the power was cut...but as far as we’re concerned, at least we have considerable normal velocity left in the sub-light engines from the hole encounter. Jimmie—” he turned to look over at the still-shaken navigator, “Is there any way to determine where we are?”
Biting his lower lip, until the pinkish flesh turned almost red, Jimmie shook his head, before answering, “No way, Neil...can’t