The Orthogonal Galaxy (55 page)

“
Well, we appreciate ya’
makin’ the trip just fer us, Garrison,” said Blade
gratefully.

Paol continued to catch up
with their astronaut friend, “How’s the family,
Garrison.”

“
Great, thanks—everyone is
just great. Had you heard about the baby?”

“
Yes, we did—we also heard
that Timmer wasn’t exactly thrilled.”

“
Funny—when he first found
out that he was going to have a little sister, he was quite
agitated. ‘Send her back!’ he demanded. But now, he seems to enjoy
playing the role of big brother. He loves helping her with her
bottle, but he still thinks diapers are icky”.

“
Well, they is icky,”
Blade agreed with a comical shudder and contorted face, to which
the group laughed readily.

“
So how are you guys
feeling anyway?” Garrison asked with genuine interest in his pair
of comrades with whom he had spent more than a few hours in
training.

“
We’re doing well,” Paol
spoke for both. “Leaving Earth was a bit of a trying experience.
But the headaches are gone, and the stomachs as good as ever—except
for the want of something a little more solid in them. As we adjust
to weightlessness, NASA is keeping our diets fairly
soft.”

O’Ryan shook his head, and
asked again. “No, I mean how are you
feeling
?” He hung on the last word
for a moment to help clarify its meaning.

“
Ah—you mean emotionally,”
Paol looked at Blade and a brief silence ensued.

After a deep sigh, Blade
commenced. “We ain’t gonna kid you, Garrison—it ain’t easy comin’
to realize you’re leavin’ everythin’ behind fo’ more and a dozen
years—” He swallowed hard. “—Or worse.” His voice trailed
off.

Paol stepped up to
complete his partner’s train of thoughts. “We really have no clue
if we’ll make it back, right? You go through every imaginable
horrible scenario. I didn’t see Camp Mars first hand, but I saw
plenty of pictures. The thing that annihilated your home up
there—well, that’s the thing we’re hitching a ride on, right? You
can’t find a wind tunnel in the Solar System that can shake this
tin can up enough to know that it will hold up in the barrage of
particles traveling at twenty five thousand times the speed of
light. Then, how many hostile settings can you think of for this
planet that we haven’t the foggiest notion about. But you know
what’s worse than thinking about all of that, Garrison?”

Garrison shook his head
silently.

“
What’s worse is thinking
about it over and over for the next twenty-seven thousand light
years of travel.”

“
But it’s supposed to go
in a blink of an eye,” said Garrison in amazement. “As far as I
understand what the physicists are saying, you guys are going to
sleep through most of it.”

“
Really, Garrison?” Paol’s
eyes narrowed as he probed the astronaut’s expression for any clues
to help him discern his thoughts. “Why, then, did every
astronaut—including yourself—refuse the opportunity to come on this
mission?”

O’Ryan was not prepared
for this loaded question. He stammered through some unconvincing
vocalized pauses, and weakly mumbled words like “family”, and
“Mars.” After collecting himself, he admitted. “Guys, I know—this
isn’t anywhere close to a slam dunk, and I thought through many of
the same issues, but even if I did want to go, I was still
traumatized from the Mars incident. Besides, I couldn’t leave my
young family. My son would grow up without his father—he would be
19 years old when I returned. My baby would be a teenager before
she even had a chance to meet her father. You wouldn’t go either if
you were in my shoes.”

“
Nope. I wouldn’t.” A
blank look of bitterness swept over Joonter’s face, and in a blink,
every moment since his arrest flashed through his mind in an
instant—the unjust verdict, the ridiculous sentence, the red-eyed
and tear-stained face of his wife, the plane crash in Nevada, his
injuries in Brazil, and now this—a mission touted as a certain
suicide by many rational individuals.

A voice over the
communication system interrupted his thoughts. “ST3, this is Moon
Orbiter do you copy?”

Paol turned his head
towards the cockpit, but in his mental state, he found himself
rooted to the spot. Blade grabbed hold of the side of the vessel,
and spun himself around awkwardly. Making his way towards his seat,
he sat down and placed a headset over his right ear.

“
This is ST3. We copy
ya’.”

“
Fueling is complete, and
we are ready to untether, but I think you have one of our crew on
board.”

“
Yes we do,” Blade said.
“He says it’s more cozy here, and he’s thinkin’ ‘bout takin’ a spin
with us.”

“
That’s a negative ST3,”
the voice replied with a chuckle. “Tell Mr. O’Ryan that he missed
his opportunity, and will have to wait for the ST4 mission now.
Over.”

“
Copy that, Moon Orbiter.
We’ll have yer boy back with ya’ in a short moment. Over.” Blade
slowly pulled the headset off and placed it in its compartment next
to his seat. He allowed the weightlessness to distance himself from
his seat, and turned around to the other two astronauts.

“
Well, Garrison. You go
have a safe ride back home. We’ll have a lot of catchin’ up to do
in, say, twelve years or so.” Blade offered a firm
handshake.

“
Godspeed, gentlemen. I do
wish you all the best.”

“
Thanks, Garrison,” said
Paol with a tight-lipped smile. “Don’t worry about us. We’re going
to do everything imaginable to make this mission a
success.”

O’Ryan nodded and winked
at Joonter, as he backed out of the spacecraft.

“
Hey, Garrison?” Paol
called out as he began to shut the portal through which he had
entered.

“
Yeah, Paol.”

“
I’d appreciate it if this
exchange remains off the record. I don’t want Joyera any more
worried than she needs to be while I’m gone.”

“
Absolutely, Paol.
Everything we talked about stays right here until you guys open
this hatch up at Kennedy.” And with a quick wave of the wrist that
hatch sealed shut again, with a sound that reverberated like the
bars of the cell at the penitentiary.

Paol and Blade strained to
hear the detachment and departure of the Moon Orbiter, and when
they were absolutely certain that there was no audible sign of
their fuel tanker, they slowly returned to their seats and watched
the diminishing figure of the orbiter in the video monitor on the
domed ceiling. Craning their necks backwards in their reclined
seats until the dot of the spaceship was no longer visible, they
realized that they had seen the last thing from their home planet
for more about a dozen long years ahead of them.

In an instinctive impulse
to latch on to anything that would continue to connect them to
their home planet, their heads turned to the left where the
miniscule blue and white Earth sat a little less than half
illuminated from the Sun. Diminished by the immense horizon of the
moon below them, it was hard to fathom how they used to live there
along with nearly ten billion other inhabitants. How utterly small
and insignificant it seemed in the vast panorama of stars that
filled their little planetarium. Speechless, they paid their final
homage to this place they used to call home and then mechanically
set a course in the opposite direction for a destination that was
indiscernible among all the thousands of stars in their
view.

…

“
Looks like we’re half way
there, Buddy,” Blade announced.

“
Is that so?” Paol replied
lifting his eyes from the monitor where he was reading the
navigational display. The data demonstrated that Star Transport was
now “204,975,___” miles from Earth and “204,974,___” miles from
Jupiter. The reason that the least significant digits were blank
was simply because they were hurtling towards Jupiter at several
hundred miles every second. At these rates, the odometer changes so
quickly that there is no way to perceive anything in the lower
digits.

“
You know,” began Paol.
“Time seems to be going by faster than I thought it would. I
thought that sitting in the same seat hour upon hour would get
tedious.”

“
I thinks it helps that
NASA gives us a good schedule to follow,” surmised Blade. “The
daily activities seems broken up pretty well.”

“
Good point! There really
is nothing on the schedule so lengthy as to make the time go slow.
Between meals, exercise, scientific experiments, journals and logs,
reading, and communications, the day does go by quite
naturally.”

“
I understand now why they
told us how important it is to stick to the schedule. Our bodies
are used to the night fo’ sleepin’, and the daylight fo’ bein’
awake. But up here, all 24 hours are exactly the same. The body
needs the schedule to keep from gettin’ into some whacky state. I
was thinkin’ when I woke up this mornin’ that the body would be
used to, say, a 27 hour schedule if that’s how fast Earth rotated.
I wonders what kind of schedule the body would naturally fit into
if there was no night or day. I could see things gettin’ totally
random, and that would be unhealthy, since there’d be no regular
pattern of sleep.”

This became food for
thought, and both astronauts were silent in their musings on this
matter, as they stared—literally—off into space. Jupiter was a
focal point of much staring to be sure. First, it was their next
destination, and further, it was directly in front of them, but
even more than that, it was quickly becoming the most recognizable
object in the sky. Occasionally, they would force their planetarium
to turn to a different location, and most often they would choose
to turn 180 degrees around, to watch the sun growing more dim and
cold. It was shrinking and they knew that in the coming days,
Jupiter would begin to appear larger than the Sun.

A series of three soft
chimes directed the astronauts’ attention back to the control panel
in front of them. In large letters, the display splashed the text,
“Communication from: Joyera Joonter.” It had been eight days since
their departure from the Moon, and Star Transport was now far
enough away from Earth that communications between the vehicle and
its home base now required well over a quarter of an hour before
arriving at its destination. As a result, there were no
conversations per se, just messages sent back and forth at regular
intervals of the day. Immediate family had a phone number they
could call to leave a recorded message. Mission control specialists
would then package and send these conversations up at regular
intervals up to a few times each day. While Blade’s uncle or mother
had stopped calling when they were unable to speak to Blade in real
time, Joyera continued to call her husband once or twice every
day.

Paol eagerly grabbed a
headset, and placed it on his head to receive the message from his
wife. “Paol, my love, as I continue to monitor your spaceship on
the computer, you are getting so far from Earth that it is really
starting to set in now that we will be apart for a long time. But,
the days still go by quickly. The media still call for interviews
and updates. I can’t go out in public without being thronged by
people with encouraging remarks and compliments. You are a real
hero, and I’m so proud. Oh… the boys… I almost forgot. They
received an invitation to the White House by the President’s son.
They say they’re ‘wildly ultra-dimensional’—kids and their slang
these days. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to Paris, but
NASA’s public relations office is putting on quite a bit of
pressure. They fear that if I refuse the offer from President
Chartier, she may take offense. The problem is that I know it will
remind me of our tenth anniversary in Europe. It’s going to feel
empty there without you, Dear.

“
Regarding your last
message, I’m about half way through Seddy’s book. I agree with you
that his theories on extra-terrestrial intelligence evolution are
quite interesting, but I have to point out they are just
that—theories. We still haven’t discovered a single intelligent
communication coming from anywhere in the Milky Way. I know, I
know… distance between stars, dark energy interference, yada yada.
I do have to reiterate, Paol… please be careful on Earth2, and
don’t take anything for granted. Even if you find intelligent
beings, don’t take anything at face value. Unless the same human
seed was used to fill inhabitable planets, we can’t assume anything
that anybody says or does. Just… just be careful, Love!

“
Well… gotta run now. I’ll
look forward to hearing your voice when I return home this evening.
Have a great day, and tell Blade I said hello… poor fellow. It must
be hard not having any family to talk with, especially at this time
of such change. I’m sure he could use some encouraging words. I
love you, my hero!”

Paol slowly removed the
headset and mechanically returned it to its holster beside his
seat. He looked over to notice his companion lying back with his
eyes closed and a peaceful smile on his face. He reached out with
his right hand to get his partner’s attention, and then drew it
back, thinking it was better not to disturb him in such
contemplative peace and relaxation. Instead, he slipped the headset
back on and listened to Joyera’s message a couple more times.
Hearing her voice helped him feel that she wasn’t so far away, even
though he knew that hundreds of millions of miles were beyond his
comprehension.