Tiona (a sequel to "Vaz") (36 page)

But, if he was going to save Ralph, he needed to take himself out soon. He couldn’t just wait a few days for Ralph to let his guard down.

Zack started trying to think of some way to do himself in without going outside. Something quick, and hopefully painless.

There was a pop on the radio channel the space suits used. Zack sighed,
Probably Ralph checking up on me,
he thought.

Then he heard Sophie’s voice, “Zack, Ralph, how are you guys doing?”

“Doing good girlfriend,” Zack said despite his depression, cheered to hear her voice.

Ralph’s voice came over the channel too. He said, “Hey Sophie! Great to hear you.”

Zack suddenly wondered how Sophie’d come over the suit channel to Bellerphon. Bellerphon had a relay function that could take messages from Houston and send them out over the local suit channel, but it shouldn’t
receive
anything from Houston on the suit channel. They should only be able to pick up messages from right there in their own vicinity. Messages sent by suits! How…?

Zack didn’t really have time to complete the thought process because Sophie’s response came right back.
Without
the thirteen second delay it took for a message to go to earth and come back to Kadoma. She said, “I hear you guys would like a ride home?”

Neither Zack nor Ralph said anything for several seconds. Zack decided that Sophie must have spoken without waiting for their message to reach her. She might not notice the extra seconds delay in their reply to her, but if she did, it would be uncomfortable. Zack wondered whether Ralph had been thrown off by the strange lack of a delay, or whether he, like Zack, felt that teasing them about how they would like a ride home was inappropriate. Before Sophie said
that
, Zack would have said that nothing was barred amongst the three of them in terms of giving each other shit. But this… made him feel a little sick.
Oh well,
he thought to himself,
it isn’t like I’ve never gone over the line giving other people crap. I don’t want Sophie feeling bad after we’re gone.
“Um,” he said, stumbling a bit, “sure, we’d love a ride. Should we just stick out our thumbs?”

Ralph had apparently had similar thoughts because he spoke at nearly the same time, overlapping Zack’s reply. He said, “Sure, just pull over and we’ll hop in.” It felt obvious that Ralph was trying to say it in an upbeat manner, but he didn’t pull it off very well.

“Okay,” Sophie said cheerfully, again without a pause for transmission to earth and back! “Your ride is pulling up to Bellerphon right now. Suit up, grab whatever you need to take with you and step outside.”

Zack felt tears well up in his eyes and an ache develop in his throat at Sophie’s cute little fantasy. She’d probably decided that pretending there was a way home might somehow cheer them up… instead, it was breaking Zack’s heart. Without thinking, he said, “I’d be out there already, but Ralph left and locked me inside this damned tin can.” Then he realized that not only had he not sounded as cheerful as he had intended, but that he’d just given away the fact that Ralph still thought he was going to try to kill himself.

Once again, Sophie responded immediately. This time she responded to what Zack had just said. She couldn’t have sent this message without having heard what he just said. Her voice had turned serious, “Zack! Don’t do anything crazy! I really
am
here to get you. Really, really, really! Oops, I can see that your outer airlock door is jammed with a wrench. Looks like Ralph’s been trying to keep you from doing something wacko. Ralph, if you’re not doing something really important, head on back to Bellerphon. I’m suiting up to go get Zack.”

Zack hung motionless in the center of Bellerphon, his eyes focused in the infinite distance.
I guess I’ve lost touch with reality,
he thought.
I must be making up this entire conversation, pretending there’re no delays in Earth-Kadoma communications, imagining that Sophie’s outside and can see that damned wrench… So, this is what crazy feels like…

Ralph’s voice came on the suit channel, “Holy shit!” He didn’t say anything more, though later he confided to Zack that he’d been about to say, “Holy shit, a flying saucer?” when rationality struck and he censored himself.

Zack continued drifting in the middle of Bellerphon, wondering what he could do about his apparent insanity. After a moment, he decided that his present state wasn’t so bad. Then he realized that if he was out of touch he would be even more of a burden on Ralph.
I really should find a way to do myself in before I completely destroy Ralph’s chances of getting home.

Zack tried to focus his mind on suicide methods. He found himself somewhat distracted as he continued imagining that he was hearing a conversation going on between Ralph and Sophie, but did his very best to ignore it. In his mind’s conversation they were coming to Bellerphon to rescue him. Eventually, he decided that electrocution was his best chance. He pulled himself to the supply closet and got out some heavy duty wire. He stripped the ends and wrapped one end around his wrist, twisting it together to make a solid loop.

Zack had folded the other bare end of the wire over and was about to insert it into a power outlet. He didn’t think anything would happen while he was floating free, he’d have to grab a ground with his other hand, but he was a little worried that the jerking convulsion induced by the shock might knock him loose before the current did him in. He’d just decided to get another wire and use it on the other wrist, when he heard some clanking at the airlock.
Damn, Ralph’s back.

Zack quickly pulled the wire off his wrist, wound it back up into a bundle and pushed off for the supply closet to put it away. He didn’t want Ralph guessing his plans and trying to hide all the wire or something like that. Zack heard air hissing into the lock to fill the chamber.

A moment later, the inner door of the airlock opened and a space-suited figure pulled itself inside. Ralph seemed smaller in Zack’s hallucination… Zack felt confused as Ralph didn’t pop off his helmet like he usually did as soon as he came in the lock.

Then Zack saw Sophie’s smiling face in the visor.
I’ve really gone off the deep end
, he thought.

As Zack watched and listened bemusedly, his hallucination of Sophie tried to talk to him through her helmet. For some reason he could hear the pumps cycling the airlock again. He wondered how that fit into his imagination as he continued smiling at his imaginary Sophie. She was saying, “I can’t take off my helmet, I’d get the bends. I’m at ten psi rather than the five psi and hundred percent oxygen you guys are running.” She laughed, “You should see me trying to move around in the vacuum out there. With so much pressure in my suit I can hardly wiggle. If Ralph hadn’t come along to help, I probably couldn’t have gotten into the airlock!”

To Zack’s astonishment, the airlock door opened again. Ralph came in and immediately popped his helmet like he always did. He smiled broadly and said, “Put on your space-suit asshole, Sophie’s come to take us home!”

Zack’s eyes tracked back and forth from one to the other. Sophie’s spacesuit looked brand-new compared to Ralph’s. The details in this hallucination were surprisingly sophisticated. Somehow he’d always thought hallucinations had blurry edges. Still in his suit, Ralph pushed over to Zack, grabbed him and gave him a little shake. “What’s going on with you, Man? Did you get into the drugs again?”

Zack found himself shaking his head, “Nope, I seem to be having this hallucination
without
any drugs.”

Ralph turned to Sophie. He barked a little laugh, “Honestly, I can see why he might think he’s hallucinating. That was the first thing that went through my mind.” He turned back to Zack, “Hey, in the midst of your hallucination, humor me. Let’s put on your spacesuit and go outside.”

Bemused, Zack had gotten into his spacesuit at Ralph’s urging. Ralph had gone out the lock first. It seemed that even his hallucinatory Ralph worried that Zack might take off his helmet out there.

Outside, Zack almost laughed when he saw a flying saucer hanging a few meters away from Bellerphon and Kadoma. Sometimes this hallucination seemed spot on, other times it bordered on the ridiculous. Ralph clipped Zack to a safety cable, apparently not trusting Zack to do it himself. Then Ralph helped Sophie out of the airlock. She really couldn’t maneuver very well in her tightly inflated spacesuit.

Once Ralph had clipped Sophie onto a safety line as well, he grabbed Zack and gently pushed off toward the flying saucer. It was immediately evident to Zack that Ralph had misjudged the push for himself and Zack. Their trajectory was going to miss the saucer. Then the saucer rolled ninety degrees to put its wide disk in their way like a catcher’s mitt. To Zack it looked like they were going to hit the big windows on the top of the saucer.

He wondered if the windows might break. The people inside appeared to be in street clothes and a broken window would probably be bad news for them. Zack decided that they were moving so slowly that the windows probably wouldn’t break, but then the saucer moved a little bit so that they were going to land on the big disk near the door at the back.

There didn’t seem to be any handholds near the door, a poor design for weightless work. Ralph reached out with both hands and tried to grab on, but he slipped off. Zack reached out and managed to stick his fingers into the recessed door handle latch, thinking,
I was always better coordinated at this weightless stuff than Ralph was.
He grabbed Ralph’s safety cable and tugged him back towards himself, laughing at the fact that he was taking pride in his zero gravity skills while he was in the midst of an imaginary fantasy. For a moment, he wondered if it could be a dream instead of a hallucination. It didn’t seem to have the disjointed stream of events that his dreams usually did.

Ralph opened the door to a small chamber that apparently served as an airlock to this flying saucer. He motioned Zack in, so Zack clambered in, having to crouch to fit inside of it. Ralph shut the door behind him. Zack looked up and saw a young man peering through the window at him. Pressure started to increase on him and after a moment he could hear air hissing. His suit collapsed around him and the pressure kept increasing. He had to start popping his ears as the pressure kept going up and up well beyond the pressure in his suit.

Eventually the hissing stopped and the inner door opened. Zack pulled himself into the saucer and looked around bemusedly at a group of five seats which looked like they’d been pulled out of a car. A pretty blond woman in ill-fitting clothes was strapped into one of them. The young man said, “You can take your helmet off now.”

With an even greater sense of unreality, Zack popped his helmet and took it off. The air seemed fine. Nothing inside the saucer looked like a typical NASA design, another indication that this whole thing was imaginary.

Suddenly, on both Zack’s suit radio and on speakers which seemed to fill the saucer, they all heard Ralph exclaim, “Oh, crap! Sophie’s broken loose!”

Holding to a seatback, Zack looked up and saw a spacesuit drifting slowly away overhead while the person inside it thrashed around.

Ralph said, “I’d unclipped her to put her in the airlock! When she started to slip away, I tried to grab her, but instead I knocked her away even faster!”

The young man in the saucer spoke, “Stay calm. Sophie, we’ll be able to get you, relax. Ralph, you need to detach yourself from the safety line so the saucer can go after her. Get a good grip on the door of the airlock so you won’t come loose yourself.”

A moment later, Ralph said, “Okay, I’ve got myself wedged into the airlock and have a good grip on the door.”

The young man said, “Tiona, you should fly the saucer after her manually rather than trying to instruct the AI. Have it reduce thrust to a tenth of a percent so that you don’t accidentally overdo it.”

The wide eyed blonde woman, apparently named Tiona, swallowed, gave a little nod, murmured to an AI, then gripped a large joystick by her right hand. She twisted it and the saucer gently rolled until it was facing Sophie’s slowly receding form. The blonde girl pushed her joystick forward a little and Zack felt a slight tug from the seatback as the saucer started moving after Sophie. He pulled himself down and strapped into the seat. Moments later, Sophie had stopped receding and had started approaching. When they’d gotten close, the girl pulled back on her joystick and Zack felt tugging from his seat’s harness as they slowed. They very slowly closed in on Sophie. When it looked like they were only two meters away a twist of the big joystick ball rotated the saucer around until the back end with the airlock was closest to Sophie.

Zack wondered how the girl would see for the final approach to Sophie when she couldn’t see her out the back, then realized the girl was looking down at a screen apparently showing Sophie from a rear camera. Sophie drifted slowly closer as the young woman nudged the joystick with tiny movements. Ralph’s voice came on the spacesuit channel, “Okay, she’s four feet away, three, two, I’ve got her!”

Zack looked out the front windows and saw Kadoma and Bellerphon slowly receding away. Thumps at the back of the saucer suggested that Ralph was helping Sophie into the airlock.
Is this real?!

Sophie crouched in the little airlock, trembling with reaction after having floated away. Even though she’d been moving very slowly, drifting away into space is every astronaut’s nightmare. She’d been slowly tumbling and without reaction jets, she hadn’t been able to stop it. The motion made it hard to see what was going on behind her. She’d heard them talking about her on the suit radio, so she had known they were trying to come after her, but hearing them talk about it wasn’t very reassuring. She wanted to
see
them coming.