The Griffin became our world. Cold, empty vacuum waited just outside its thin shell. It did not take long for someone to set the habitat module’s walls, ceiling, and floor to display a portion of Yellowstone, with open portals of distant stars interrupting the illusion. At light speeds, the stars always seem to look different. There is no distortion or phase-shifted coloring, but there is the feeling of being inside a cosmic bubble looking out. The fact the stars pass so slowly, even as you travel at speeds that are powers of light, makes you realize your greatest concept of distance remains wanting.
We began our pilot and engineering rotations. Pilot teams of two on twelve-hour shifts, with each pilot required to log six hours as pilot in command. We could switch off and take breaks as desired as long as we put in our six. Danica and Shelly asked to be a team. That left Doc and me. Only one engineer needed to maintain station on the engineering consoles, so for them it was rotating six-hour shifts, with a designated backup for breaks.
We settled into a smooth daily pattern of keeping busy. On the flight deck some of the digital readouts were spinning like tops, so fast you could not read them, but outside the forward windows it always looked as though the ship was barely moving. The pilots had their overhead monitors set to display the external cameras all around so they could see the stars in every direction. In the habitat module there was always someone mag-locked in a chair at the oval table, reading or writing on a tablet. RJ had a particular seat he used to play solitaire with his slightly magnetic deck of cards. Occasionally a card would get away and he would snatch it out of the air and pat it back down. Poker games and other pastimes fell into a schedule of sorts with varying participants, some experienced, some not. The table became a place for the meeting of minds. Paris had been resident in the bathroom for the first three days, just as he had on the brown dwarf mission. We slated him for engineering shifts, but for those first three days he was a no-show. He set a new standard for someone incompatible with space travel.
Griffin was large enough that we weren’t in each other’s face. Since there were usually two or three people manning the flight deck, the remaining five tended to spread out in the gym, the science lab, the aft airlock, the sleeper compartments, and the habitat area. There seemed to be enough privacy. The wall displays changed often and were sometimes exotic. I once passed by RJ with his sleeper cell open. He was lying in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies, as he described it. He claimed it was something from an ancient music album.
When the time seemed right, I held an impromptu meeting using the forward airlock and flight deck and blew everyone’s mind by revealing that the Griffin had long-range communications, shields, and weapons. With the concealed panels opened they got a crash course in the use of those and a stern lecture of when it would be appropriate and when not. The weapons were off-limits to everyone except pilots since spacecraft maneuvering was a part of the operation. Copilots could run the sim program for practice at their convenience.
That discussion on special attributes set me up nicely to go into our mission objectives and mission sponsors. I did my best to explain how unexplainable the Nasebian race was, and went into as much detail as I had on the lost Nasebian spacecraft, its purpose, and the artifact we were to locate and recover. I must have done a pretty good job, because afterward they all seemed somewhat dumbfounded and unable to find any questions to ask. They had all read the mission briefing documents. They were probably hoping I would clarify the portions that skimmed over the advanced cultural and scientific differences of the Nasebian race, attributes which were actually beyond human understanding. Our impromptu meeting broke up with many looks of consternation and no discussion at all.
The conclusion of our first leg eventually would be marked by a rendezvous with an unexplored celestial body designated as ZY627a, detected some time ago by a deep space probe but never visited by an Earth ship. It was farther away than anyone had ever been. Probe data indicated the presence of water and possibly vegetation. The agency considered it a win-win place for us to make a stop. It would signal our entry into unexplored space and provide a good location for a relay station. For the first time, data originating in deep south polar ecliptic space would be sent back from what might possibly be an Earth-like planet capable of supporting human outposts on future flights. We were to park in orbit, evaluate a landing, and if feasible put down and set up the relay station. If the environment was hospitable we could take a brief shore leave and collect specimens. It would take us eight weeks to get there, a five hundred light year plunge.
Doc turned out to be one hell of a card player. The man could bluff a psychic. He claimed it was from years of lying to his patients. I sat with two fives showing and a pair of aces in my hand. He had two fours on the table, kept raising, and every time I caught him looking at his hand, I’d swear I saw the reflection of the third four in his eye. It was so persuasive I had to fold, and then of course as the bastard raked in the magnetic pot he wouldn’t tell me if he had it or not.
Erin was a card shark in her own right as well. She tried to play the distraction game. She kept asking him about his past and his MD status. She pressed him on the subject, wanting to know how a medical man could end up spending most of his time in a cockpit. Doc was not shy about it.
“Actually, I don’t mind telling that story cause there’s some stuff people ought to know about doctoring. I was the gifted child growing up. Went into college pre-med when I was sixteen. I had a good take on things. Figured healing people had to be the most beneficial thing a person could do. Breezed through college in three but then the intern crap started. It’s when you learn there’s something wrong with a whole bunch of the residents you’re following around. You don’t realize the system has driven them batty until it’s too late. You’re already strapped in and going along on the same ride. If you survive the breakneck pace of internship and the frequent pummeling that goes along with it, they find you guilty of being ready and throw you into triage. They don’t believe in letting you hone your newly applied skills at a reasonable rate. They cast you into a nonstop mess of every illness and injury imaginable where you only get seconds to diagnose, and when you’re wrong sometimes somebody dies. They consider that an important part of the training. By the time you get your license to practice you are not the same dude you were, and you are not the dude you intended to be. And so the practitioner becomes licensed to be as eccentric as he wants to allow him to put aside all the hell he didn’t expect to go through to get there. For me, I needed something intense to get away from it. I started drinking, only on off-hours, mind you. Didn’t want any more nightmares added to the ones I was already keeping. All that, and I was only 27 years old. Lucky for me there was a big air show outside of Dallas one year. I took a ride in an old P38 trainer. The guy scared the hell outa’ me so bad it made me realize I had forgotten everything while I was up there. And that was it. I started flying weekends and seeing patients during the week. Then it became three-day weekends. Then one day I sat up in bed and realized I was flying more days than I was being a practitioner. I did a stint in the National Guard as a med-vac pilot. Started doing air shows on weekends. Kept up with my medical certs, but only did volunteer work at local clinics. And so, there you have it, kiddies: the real true nature of medicine and the practice thereof.”
“Amazing,” replied Erin.
“Ah, but not so much more than your own story, I’m betting,” said Doc.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, a darling young thing perfectly sculpted for some fashion designer’s fancy, and yet you chose to be a grease-monkey, my dear; a member of my own club if you think about it. How could such an unlikely pairing as that be possible?”
Erin laughed. “I was my father’s daughter, as they say. It began with the handing of tools when I was six or seven. My parents noticed I had an affection for powered vehicles so they got me a plastic, motorized racer. I ran it inside too fast so I was evicted to
the back yard. I couldn’t get it to go fast enough out there, so one day I taped ten of my brothers model rockets to it and hooked the igniters to the battery with a switch in the driver’s compartment. I got the thing up to full speed outside on the sidewalk, where I was not allowed to go, and then fired off the rockets. It only gave me another couple miles per hour, but my parents happened to step outside just as I went by and it scared the crap out of them. From that time on they kept a closer eye on what I was doing, and they accepted that my vocation was all but chosen.”
Erin looked at me. “What about you, Adrian? What’s your story?”
“Oh no. I have a past but I choose not to account for it.”
RJ shuffled and laughed under his breath. “It’s just as well, my fellow tube stuffers. Anything he might say would need parental guidance.”
Erin persisted. She twisted around and called to the flight deck. “Hey, Wilson, is Adrian’s secret past really that bad?”
Wilson leaned back and looked out from his engineering station. “If you’re talking about that time in Delaware, it was blown all out of proportion. Nobody had a flamethrower. That was all a lie.”
RJ dealt. “I rest my case.”
We made it through the next four weeks with few problems. Paris Denard’s sullenness gave everyone the creeps, but other than that the ride was enjoyable. The company I had chosen to keep turned out to be solid, reliable people who knew how to make the best of any situation. The fact that we were closing in on ZY627a perked everyone’s interest. There were frequent guests on the flight deck. RJ began asking, “Are we there yet?”
I was stretched out in my sleeper watching a very old video called Apollo 13 when I got a call. I had just about decided it was the wrong thing to be watching when you’re several hundred light years from Earth in an untested spacecraft.
'Commander, report to the flight deck' was an unusual way of calling me after so many weeks together. I shut down the movie, opened up, and pushed out.
There were six of them squeezed into the flight deck; Danica and Shelly up front, RJ and Wilson at Engineering, Erin and Doc suspended between them. They had to maneuver out of the way for me to enter.
RJ spoke. “It’s the secondary high gain scanning antenna; suddenly went completely dead. No collision avoidance systems warnings, but maybe something small hit it. Or, maybe it just died.”
“And the primary?”
“Just fine. All the other systems are just fine.”
Wilson, added, “We can live without it, Adrian, but standard procedure is to go out and fix it.”
“Mmm. So the options are, hold light and wait until we’re parked in orbit, or drop out now, fix it, and go back to light. That’s an iffy little choice, isn’t it? Anyone have an opinion?”
Erin piped up. “Fix it.”
I nodded. “You know what? I’d like to get in a good inspection of Griffin before we drop into anybody’s gravity field. So let’s do it. Danica set it up and shut us down. Who’s got the most background on scanning arrays?”
Before anyone else could answer, Erin barged in, “Me!”
We all knew it was Wilson. Nobody said anything. I looked at Wilson. He nodded.
“Okay, you’d better go set up a suit then. RJ, want to be her suit tech? As soon as you’re done, we’ll all strap in for decel.”
Erin threw herself happily toward the back. RJ pushed out and followed.
“So Danica and Shelly, program us to resume as soon as we’re back inside. Wilson, if we have any problems we will call you.”
“If I’m not here, leave a message.”
“Funny, Wilson. Really funny.”
We strapped in for deceleration, and as the stellar drives wound down to station keeping Erin and I unbuckled and headed back. In the airlock, I secretly marveled at her. We sat, waiting for the pressures in our suits to drop to green, watching RJ seal us in. The long ivory-blonde hair was tied back and bundled under her white stretch cap, but it only made her look more childlike. She had that pink aura about her face surrounding the delicate, fine lines of a newborn. I had to steal glances so she would not catch me looking. Her beauty was a complete contrast to the techno-rigidity of the spacesuit helmet and visor. Her face behind the clear glass did not seem real. When the suits gave us the ready signal, I hit the door control and was finally distracted by distant stars coming into view.
That familiar feeling of first-step-outside returned. Each time your mind searches for new ways to define it. A feeling of emptiness and vulnerability as if you don’t have a suit on at all, always so overwhelming it takes something away. You notice Mother Earth’s absence even though it does not come as a surprise. The curtain of stars all around are too far away to be surrogate companions.
A pang of fear hit me as I turned to look at Griffin. With no other ships nearby she suddenly looked tiny. It was another stark, familiar reminder that we were delicate human forms kept alive in a vacuum by only this man-made eggshell. Even with all the EVA hours I had spent embraced by this special brand of cold, there was apparently still some fear left. I turned and looked for Erin. She was parked too close over my right shoulder. Through her clear visor I realized the newness of that same fear had gripped her much more tightly. I tapped the private com button on my spacesuit sleeve. “Just like the simulations, Erin.”
She was gutsy. Many people with that same look on their face would not have been able to speak. She stared into the emptiness and without looking away said, “No, not the same. It’s God out here.”
I had never heard it put quite that way. Perhaps it was the only title you could put on something so inconceivably enormous and yet at the same time expanding all around you. Perhaps, with everything else removed, that really was what you were suspended within.
“You ready to head up?”
She fumbled with her backpack arms and jetted slightly the wrong way, but quickly corrected. “Ready.”
We thrusted above the retracted wing toward the back of the ship, then up the side to the tail section where the scanning arrays were located. There were service rings to clip to and the access panels were topside and in our faces, easy to remove. I folded back my control arms and with Erin clipped next to me, pulled out the fastener remover and began opening the twelve-inch service panel for the secondary array antenna amplifier. Even through the suit I could feel cold on the panel and fasteners. This would be an easy-level repair. Pull out the black box, shove in its replacement, close up the patient and you’re done. The exterior service lighting was doing a good job. Sometimes the fasteners bind, but this time they did not. The package came out so smoothly it surprised me and the new one went in just as nicely. I called in. “How’s that look, guys?”
Wilson’s voice came over the com. “Hold there a minute.”
I held the compartment cover in place but waited before securing it. Finally, Wilson came back. “Wow! That’s it, you guys. You’re good.”
Erin helped with the plate as I got the fasteners started, then torqued everything down. When it was done, I held up one glove. It took her a minute to understand, but she finally high-fived me. Her first high-five in space. We stowed our stuff, pulled down our thrust controls and unhooked. If it had been Wilson we would have separated and each taken a side of the ship to inspect, but Erin still had that look on her face. So we stayed together. We jetted over the top of the tail, and down around to the underside. Griffin’s skin still looked new. Erin held too close, occasionally bumping me. I tried not to notice.
We coasted along the underside and came up around the nose. They had set the windows to transparent and four of them were in there waving at us. Erin forgot herself for the moment and began waving back wildly. I had to pause for her to catch up.
Griffin looked great. She was ready for another five hundred light years. We sealed in the airlock and sat waiting for our suits to come up to pressure and our air mix to bleed down to cabin air. When the time came, Erin twisted off her helmet and there was a smile f
rom ear to ear that she could not hide. We did not waste time. We strapped back in and made the jump. Next stop, ZY627a.
Chapter 29