The Cause of Death (13 page)

"Isn't that supposed to prove that telepathy or psychic energy or whatever exists, and that different people were getting different signs and signals, or something?"

"Nope. They tested the effects, and spoiled all the good stories. They didn't detect any noticeable effects on measurable brain waves--but they
did
confirm that the various field gradients are steep enough to make the view from one chair totally different than the view from another. It's a real effect. What I see as blue puppy dogs floating slowly past might look like red chickens flying rapidly in the other direction to you, because you're two meters away. No one can predict it. So I hope you like surprises."

Jamie glanced over at the countdown display. Three minutes and a few seconds left. He shut his eyes. Not enough time to go and do anything. All he could do was what he was doing already--sit there and wait. It was the first real chance he had had in a while to just stop and take a little time for himself. He savored the feeling.

But that small luxury wasn't his for long. An alert tone went off, and the words INCOMING OUICKBEAM MESSAGE lit up on the main display.

"Oh, great," Hannah muttered. "Perfect timing."

"What's the problem?" Jamie asked.

"QB messages and transit-jumps don't mix," she said. "Even besides the transit-jump power-down, the transit-jump itself can jam reception. If we don't complete reception before the jump, and we miss the end of the message, we might be out of luck. Even if we miss just a chunk of the message during transit, that could be trouble, if they've used some sort of monolithic encryption."

"I thought they resend QB messages a few minutes later for just that reason," Jamie said.

"They do--when the sender pays for it," Hannah said. "If someone is sending on a budget, or decided to risk sending one long signal once with no backup, instead of sending a shorter one twice, or if we've already managed to miss the first transmission, we're out of luck."

A monolithic encrypt meant the decrypt was an all-or-nothing proposition. No part of the message could be decrypted unless all of it was in hand. Getting only the first portion of the message would leave them not with half the text, but with a partial message that could not be decrypted at all.

QuickBeam messages were faster than light. However, the actual transmission rate was maddeningly slow, and highly susceptible to all sorts of variables. The relatively small and low-power receivers that could fit aboard a small ship like the
Hastings
could only handle a very slow transmission rate. It was like having a cross-city phone conversation with a man who talked very slowly. The message signal crossed the distance almost instantly--but if the person on the other end spoke at the rate of one word a minute, reception could still take a while to complete.

The on-screen indicator showed they were receiving the message at the glacial rate of one byte per second. The transmission rate edged up to 1.5 bytes per second, 1.8., and even as high as 2.1 before edging back down to one byte per second, and even a hair below.

Jamie glanced at the countdown clock. Two minutes until transit-jump. "Come on, come on," he muttered at the QB receiver.

The message might be any number of other things, but it was just barely possible it might be from Bindulan Halztec--
if
Bindulan had decided, for whatever reason, that a message from Jamie Mendez was a top priority and he answered it at once.

But that was a long shot. Jamie was starting to feel a little foolish about wasting BSI time and money on the nonsensical idea of a message to his old boss. He had been a stock boy, after all. Jamie had been a good worker and a courteous subordinate, and Bindulan had been kind, even respectful, to him--but that was no reason to think he had some sort of claim on Bindulan.

Ninety seconds until transit-jump. A new message appeared on the displays.

INITIATING PRE-TRANSJUMP POWER-DOWNS

The
Hastings
was shutting herself down as completely as possible, so that power surges would have fewer places to crop up and less chance to do damage. A whole series of subsystem names started to scroll by under the main notice.

COMMAND DECK LIFE SUPPORT . . .

SAFE
POWER-DOWN COMPLETE

MAIN DECK LIFE SUPPORT . . .

SAFE
POWER-DOWN COMPLETE

ENVIRONMENTAL THERMAL CONTROL SYSTEM . . .
SAFE

POWER-DOWN COMPLETE

The ventilator fans died, and Jamie was disconcerted, not so much by the silence as by the realization that he had been surrounded by their low hum for days without hearing it. Other systems switched off, each subtracting its previously unnoticed whir or tick or hiss from the background noise of a working spacecraft. "What about the message retrieval system?" Jamie asked, his voice sounding oddly loud in the suddenly too-quiet command center.

"Checking that now," Hannah said, scrolling through a status page on her left-hand screen. "One of the last systems to be cut out, and the first to come back on," she said. "It shouldn't be off-line for more than a few seconds."

"Suppose we need the QB receiver on for those few seconds?"

"Then we're out of luck. Suppose we did have the QB receiver on for those few seconds and it fused into a solid lump, or blew up, or caught fire?"

There wasn't any good answer to that. He glanced at the QB retrieval indicator, and swore under his breath as the reception rate briefly dropped to .5 bytes per second, before climbing back up to to the dizzying heights of 2 bps.

"Hang on," said Hannah. "Lights and nonessential displays next--then acceleration compensation and gravity control."

"Tell me the main thrusters are off," Jamie said. If they were still accelerating at twenty gees, or whatever fearsome rate it was, and the compensators went out--well, then, they'd most likely be dead so fast they wouldn't notice it happening.

Hannah chuckled--but double-checked her displays. "Yes, the thrusters are off. Acceleration zero. We can't tell, thanks to the compensators, but the auto- sequencer cut the engines out ten minutes ago. Believe me, there are all sorts of interlocks to make sure we don't do a transit-jump with our main engines firing."

"Yeah," Jamie muttered. "Nothing can possibly go 'worng.'" The cabin lights died and his insides did a few quick backflips as the grav system cut out and left them in the dark and in zero gee. Jamie had little experience in zero-gravity environments, and it was a struggle to keep his stomach from registering a violent protest.

Only a few displays were still lit, glowing in the darkness, but Jamie only had eyes for the one still blandly reporting that a message was incoming. Less than a minute to go. He told himself there was very little point in staring at the display, and forced himself to look away, out the viewport. The glory of the starscape outside the darkened spacecraft showed in all its splendor, so close and real and vibrant it seemed to be just a few centimeters outside the hemispheric dome of the command center viewport.

Jamie felt overwhelmed by the waves of emotion that seemed to wash over him. The simple beauty of what he saw left him in joyous awe, but that was swept aside by wonder, and even fear. The universe was so impossibly
big
. How did humanity in general--and Jamie Mendez in particular--dare to imagine being capable of dealing with it, of going out into the stars and accomplishing anything of any value at all? And he
was
going out, to a world where few humans had ever been, to deal with a situation he was certain he did not understand, and after only a few days of study that he was equally certain had left him quite unprepared.

A chime sounded, and drew his attention back to the status display.

MESSAGE RECEIVED AND STORED

MENDEZJ_BHEMP DECRYPTION KEY REQUIRED

The changed message seemed to pop up on the screen so suddenly that Jamie had to stare at it for a moment, just to be sure it was really there. "So it is from Bindulan," he said in a low voice.

"What's MENDEZJ_BHEMP?" Hannah asked.

"My employee contact code from Bindulan Haltzec's Emporium--BHEMP," he said. He reached for the keyboard, eager to type in his decrypt key and find out what Bindulan had to tell him. Bindulan had come through for him. Bindulan knew something worth telling, and he was passing it on.

"Hold it!" Hannah called out.

Jamie paused with his hands over the keyboard, and at that moment the QuickBeam status display--and the whole QB system--went dead.

"Good," said Hannah. "If you had started keying in your decrypt key and the system shut down, it might have read your partial code as being the complete one and rejected it for being wrong. That could have lost us the whole message."

Jamie pulled his hands back from the keys. She was right. Some messages were set as one-try-only. Get the decrypt wrong, and they wouldn't just refuse to open. They'd erase themselves completely.

"Transit-jump in ten seconds," Hannah announced calmly. Even in the dim illumination coming off the few remaining system displays and the glow of starlight through the view dome, Jamie could see that Hannah's body language was a lot more on edge than her voice. She was gripping the arms of her chair hard enough to dig her fingers into the padding, leaning forward, straining against her safety belt as she stared at the transit-jump countdown clock.

Jamie could see the clock as well as she could, and his fingers were dug just as deep into the arms of his chair. It could be anything at all out there.
Anything
. Five. Four. Three. Two. One--

The clock reached zero and died.

The universe vanished altogether. Nothing. There was nothing at all. And not just beyond the viewport. The ship itself, the command center, the chair he was sitting in--even, Jamie realized in horror, his own body--were gone. He tried to gasp in astonishment, but his voice, his mouth, his throat were not there to do the job. He tried to move his head, but he had no head.

He strained to move, to blink, to look somewhere else, to look anywhere at all, but his head wasn't there, his eyes weren't there.
There
wasn't there. He could not see feel hear smell taste sense anything. Time and space were gone.

Time not there.
How long have I been this way
? he asked himself. It seemed to have started not so long ago, but how was he to be sure? Perhaps his thoughts themselves had been speeded up, or slowed down. Had it been a half second? A minute? A year?
How long will I be like this? Will I be like this forever?
It was hard not to imagine such things.
What happened to the ship
?
What happened to Hannah?
She had warned that a transition could be wildly different for two different people sitting in the same compartment. Maybe the universe had vanished for her as well--or maybe it was only Jamie.

Maybe, somehow, the transition had done some very permanent and terrible damage to his nervous system, severing every connection between his mind and the outside world. Perhaps days, weeks, months had already passed, and his body lay in some intensive care ward somewhere, while the doctors struggled to find a way to reach his mind, put it back in contact with his body--or else had to decide whether or not to pull the plug and let him die.

Or perhaps he
was
dead. Perhaps
this
was death, and death was a mind caught forever in simple and eternal nothingness. How long, he wondered, until he went mad? How would he be able to tell? Or perhaps the state of death itself would prevent him from going mad. Perhaps his mind would be locked forever in its present state, incapable of any change.

Yes, it must be death. He had heard all the old stories about a light or a tunnel--and there it was! Straight ahead of him, coming closer--

Light! He could see! And it was not a mere spot of light, it was the outside universe rushing back at him--or was he rushing back at it? Suddenly he was
in
it, flashing through it, the stars and galaxies and dust clouds and the wide dark voids and planets and light and heat and cold and dark hurtling by--

And it stopped.

And he was back where he had been, sitting in the copilot's chair, staring at the countdown clock.

The ship systems began to power themselves back up--calmly, quietly, without any fuss, as if all was right and normal with the universe.

"Did--did everything just go away, and then come back? I mean, everything?" he asked. "Did that just happen? Did it happen for you?"

Hannah answered, in a voice that seemed quiet, even subdued. "
Something
just happened. No. No it didn't.
Nothing
happened. I've--I've never been in Nothing before."

"Other people have?" Jamie asked.

"I've heard of it," Hannah said. "It's pretty unusual. Mostly what you get are the stars looking weird and distorted, or space looking blue instead of black, or a gravitational effect or something. The effect is
outside
the ship, with the ship staying more or less the same. But that was
inside
the ship."

"That was inside
us
," Jamie said. "Whatever just happened got between our brains and our bodies, or something."

"Maybe," said Hannah. "Maybe we just got flipped into some side universe where our kind of nervous system doesn't work, then flipped back. Or we just got stuck between two femtoseconds for a while."

"How could that possibly be? That doesn't even make sense."

"Fine," Hannah said. "
You
come up with a better explanation." She checked the nav boards. "The main thing is that we're alive, we're all right--and we're where we're supposed to be. We've got what looks like a nice simple navigation solution for Reqwar. We're just about four days out."

Which gave them four days to find out everything they could about the place. Jamie refocused his attention on that point--and on one very promising source of more information.

The message control system switched itself back on, and prompted him to enter his decrypt key. He reached for the keyboard--and noticed Hannah very ostensibly looking the other way. In the BSI that was a piece of basic etiquette. If everyone in an organization was trained to seek out hidden information, it was more than sensible for everyone to get into the habit of making it clear they weren't seeking out
your
hidden information.