The Orthogonal Galaxy (33 page)

Paol shook his head as he
saw the page titled ‘Case Study 2: Prisoner’s Dilemma’, and
marveled at the highlighting and well-drafted handwritten notes in
the margin.

“
Blade, I’m absolutely
flabbergasted.”

“
Flabbergasted!” winked
Blade. “To be overcome with astonishment or
stupification.”

At this, Blade waited for
Paol’s snicker—his first in weeks—before returning to his
whole-hearted laughter. At this point, Blade himself had an
epiphany. Perhaps it was the affable, easy-going nature of his
cellmate that protected him against the most hardened. How could
anyone not quickly grow to love this young man? Fate had handed him
a bad lot in his wrongful conviction, but at least he was placed
with one of the most decent men possible in this brutal
environment.

18

The pilot leaned back in
the seat of his C-320 space craft as it floated serenely through
the expanses of space. The C-320 was the most recent engineering
marvel at NASA. Capable of traveling at 0.6 times the speed of
light, it was the fastest space craft ever constructed. Now that it
had completed a rigorous three years of testing, it was on its
first mission to the outer edge of the solar system. The C-320 had
the appearance of a white bullet, although on closer inspection the
shape was more flattened than rounded, and had wing-like
protrusions on either side. It was spray-coated with some of the
highest tech material ever invented. A light-weight, elastic and
resilient polymer, it protected the ship and its passengers from
impacts with space objects.

Inside, the ship could be
deemed cozy at best, but astronauts never seemed to use that term
upon return to earth, where they almost certainly proclaim that
“sardines have no idea.” Even so, space explorers were clamoring
for opportunities to take the new-fangled vehicle for a spin
somewhere in the galaxy, simply because of the excitement of
exploring the far reaches of the solar system where no man had ever
traveled before.

“
All systems check. Having
successfully navigated through the asteroid belt and beyond the
orbit of Jupiter, we’ve obtained cruise velocity and are on time
with a rendezvous at the edge of the galaxy. The Magellan-Victoria
is all systems go,” the astronaut voiced into a headset and then
lifted the microphone away from his mouth. “You see, Tef…
everything is going normally.”

“
I know, Jainn, and that’s
what has me concerned,” replied the pilot. “There’s always a
problem on these voyages, no matter how small or insignificant. So
far, there has been nothing. It’s almost too quiet, too eerie. I
just want to get that anomaly out of the way, so I can relax and
enjoy the trip.”

Jainn shook his head.
“You’re too superstitious. Everything will be fine.” The confident
navigator reclined as far as he could in his seat and gazed out
into the expanses, stars blazing in panoramic splendor from the
cockpit. “Would you just look at that, Tef? What an amazing
view!”

Tef reclined his seat,
wanting to forget his concerns. “You’re right about that, partner.
I’m still surprised that we’re traveling faster than any human ever
has, and it feels dead still, just the hum of the ion thrust
engines.”

“
Yeah, it definitely
doesn’t feel like we’re moving… I mean I know that those stars are
very far away but it still surprises me considering the speed we’re
traveling that you hardly notice us moving.”

The two star-dazed
astronauts enjoyed the various quality of brilliance and color that
filled the black canvas behind them. Even Tef, the paranoid pilot
began to relax and forget his worries.

While the astronauts were
watching the spectacle overhead, they could not notice the tiny
particles of ice and dust left behind from some far-flung comet,
speeding by as they intersected its orbital path. However, the
C-320 was very well-equipped to sense them, and alerted them to
their presence with an audible alarm. Both returned their seats to
a fully upright position simultaneously to assess the
situation.

The pilot lowered the
microphone on his headset. “Victoria reporting to mission control
on a debris sensor. It appears as if we are being impacted on the
right side by minute debris field at an angle of 254 degrees. We’re
commencing navigation first to minimize angle of
impact.”

Tef worked a joystick to
cause a gentle and gradual roll of the craft in the direction of
the stream, to allow particles to glance off the right side of the
craft. Jainn monitored the sensor data of the craft and watched
intently for any other alarms signaling problems while navigating
out of the debris field.

Tef spoke clearly into his
headset. “Mission control, we’re going to pitch up at an angle of
13 degrees from the galactic plane to take ourselves away from the
field. Frequency of impact detection is decreasing
rapidly.”

Taking a deep breath, his
turned to his navigator. “Well, Jainn. Hopefully, we’re out of the
woods. There’s that anomaly I was worried about… may it be the
last.”

“
Yeah,” said Jainn panting
slightly. “I love this job, but I really hate...” He was
interrupted abruptly by a jolt which rolled the craft slightly to
the right. An alarm indicated some kind of breach on the wing.
Jainn looked out of the right side window in order to get a visual
on the incident and grew pale instantly.

“
Tef, I’m seeing vapor
coming off of the end of the wing!” he exclaimed. “Oh no, I’m
seeing sparks… and...” His voice trailed off as he saw a white
piece of debris floating in space just behind the wing. “Tef, we’ve
sustained damage.” The tip of the right wing had been sheared
completely off of the craft by one of the minute particles they
were attempting to avoid.

Tef continued in a
business-like manner. “It looks like I’ll need to continue the
direction of pitch in order to pull up from the debris. We really
need to distance ourselves from the portion of the vehicle that’s
traveling right next to us. If we veer into its trajectory, it
could do more damage still.”

The wing tip fell out of
view as the craft continued to pitch up, but what the unsuspecting
astronauts couldn’t see was that the particles, although fairly
sparse now, were continuing to bombard it pushing it closer and
closer to the back of the craft. As it slammed into the rear, the
C-320 yawed from side to side. An alarm indicated that damage had
indeed been sustained in the back of the craft now and that oxygen
was escaping into the vacuum of space around them. Vital cables,
electronic equipment and hardware began to ooze out of the gash
like blood, and each lost object was only adding to the damaged
exterior as it was sucked into the volume of space.

While the astronauts
struggled to regain their craft, shouting orders to each other,
closing off pressurization breaches, sweating nervously, and
listening to a litany of alarms, the craft began to pitch and yaw
violently until the ion generators in the rear of the vehicle were
severed. Tef, previously fighting the joystick, let up and leaned
back in his seat

“
Tef!” barked Jainn. “What
are you doing?! We’re spinning out of control and need to
restabilize the craft!”

“
We can’t,” proclaimed Tef
calmly, while fixing his gaze somewhere out into space.

“
Why not?!” shouted Jainn
as he glanced all over the panel, dazed by the number of lights and
alarms.

“
Listen, closely. What do
you hear?”

“
Alarms… I hear alarms.
All over the place.”

“
Exactly! You hear alarms.
But, do you hear the engines?”

Jainn strained to listen
to the remainder of his environment. He silenced all of the alarms
to get a better fix on any other sounds in the cockpit. Then, he
noticed the panel of flashing lights that were lost by a sea of
red, yellow, and white lights pulsing from the panel. The engine
failure alarms had indeed come on. Breathing heavily, he racked his
brain for a solution to the problem.

“
Ok,” Jainn struggled to
control the emotion in his voice. “Let’s think this through. We
need to get back there and restore power to the engines. Since the
craft still has power, we haven’t lost the ion generators
yet.”

“
We’ve sealed off the
cabin, Jainn. Nothing short of a spacewalk would get us back there,
but we don’t even have an airlock that we can reach. Even if we
did, we have no way of stabilizing the craft.”

“
How bad is our
destabilization situation?”

“
Can’t tell, the sensors
have been badly damaged or lost, so I don’t trust them, but if you
look at how quickly the stars are spinning, my guess is that we’re
rolling very fast, and pitching a little too. In fact, I’m guessing
we have velocity vectors in all three directions. We couldn’t
possibly calculate a successful jump-off from the
craft.”

After an uncomfortable and
eerie silence, Jainn asked his pilot, “So, what do we do now, Tef?
We can’t simply sit here and just float off into space completely
out of control! What are our possible scenarios,
captain?”

“
Well, in the worst case,”
the pilot stated in a matter-of-fact manner, “we get pulled in by
some nearby object’s gravitational field and we’ll begin to
accelerate toward it, eventually slamming into the surface and
creating a deep crater.”

“
And the best case?” asked
Jainn. “The worst doesn’t sound very encouraging.”

“
In the best case, we
become one of the universe’s most bizarre objects orbiting around
some planet or solar system as a frozen memorial to the
mission.”

Having muted all of the
alarms, the astronauts sat there in complete silence and near
darkness as the power being served from the damaged generators
weakened. Their attention was immediately drawn to a large orange
button in the middle of the panel that was sounding with a harsh,
pulsating buzz accompanying it.

“
Mission Abort!” read
Jainn. “I don’t remember seeing that button. What does it mean,
Tef?”

Tef didn’t get a chance to
answer as a final electric pulse shot through a vein-like series of
circuits throughout the surface of the aircraft. In complete
simultaneity, a thousand small explosions on the surface of the
craft reduced the Victoria and all of its contents to dust. For a
split second, all of the oxygen remaining on board turned into a
fireball of bright orange and searing blue flames, before quickly
evaporating into the quiet blackness that existed before Victoria
wandered into the region.…

Maril Scoville sat
straight up in bed. He found himself sweating profusely and
breathing heavily. He clutched his chest, feeling his heart pound
rapidly under his ribcage. It was as dark as the vastness of space
surrounding the recently destroyed C-320 Magellan-Victoria. The
harsh pulsating alarm from the C-320 cockpit panel persisted.
Slowly, Maril realized that it wasn’t a panel alarm at all.
Instead, the noised emanated from his digital clock alarm which
read 5:00 AM.

His wife rolled towards
him and rubbed his back. “What’s the matter, Honey?”

Composing himself with a
deep breath, he whispered, “Another nightmare.”

“
What happened this
time?”

“
Tef Alline. He was… he
was on a mission with the new astronaut, Jainn Tucker… and…” His
voice trailed off. “And the shield failed them.” He hung his head
and rubbed his face with his hands.

“
Oh, Honey… I’m sorry.”
She tried to focus her hazy thoughts to say something comforting,
but was having difficulty at this time of the morning. After a few
moments of silence and reduced breathing she continued, “Where are
Tef and Jainn now anyway?”

“
I think Jainn is on
family leave with a new baby. Tef was preparing for a mission to
Mars. He was going to replace the Russian astronaut on the next
shift change.”

Maril stood up from the
bed and put on his slippers and robe.

“
Will you be ok,
Sweetie?”

“
Yeah, you go back to
sleep, Love.”

5:00 AM was earlier than
Maril’s normal alarm. This was going to be a long day for the
burgeoning rocket scientist. As a project manager over a team of 30
engineers working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory adjacent to the
CalTech campus, one of his biggest tests would occur on this day.
The efforts of his team would be scoured by resident engineers and
visiting authorities from Ames, Langley, and of course NASA
headquarters.

Maril’s project was deemed
critical to the success of Star Transport. His job was to develop
the Star Shield. One of the major headaches facing theorists on
interstellar travel was how to protect the craft from random space
debris at speeds approaching the speed of light. Since the speed of
light in a vacuum is a fixed value just under 300,000 kilometers
per second, propulsion scientists referred to this value as warp
speed—a term which was borrowed from the works of twentieth century
science fiction. An object travelling at the speed of light would
be considered to be travelling at Warp 1.0.

It doesn’t take too much
imagination to consider what could happen to a spaceship that has a
head-on collision with space debris traveling at this velocity. In
fact, some of the mathematical modeling performed by Maril’s team
demonstrated that a particle of dust no bigger than one millimeter
in diameter could have catastrophic effects on a space vehicle if
the impact was just right—or perhaps better said, just wrong.
Computer simulations demonstrated that a head-on impact on the wing
of the Star Transport design would not only impale the wing, but
could saw it clean off. It didn’t take long for his computer models
to translate into nightmares that were coming with greater
frequency. In these dreams, visions of shuttle parts being ripped
apart, disintegration of the entire vehicle, or sudden explosions
provided more of an effect than a science fiction movie.