Fatal Boarding (4 page)

"Captain, we have two medical emergencies.
We're on our way back. We'll need a med team in the airlock." The
voice that acknowledged Erin's transmission was that of an ensign.
It meant that Grey and Tolson were already on their way.

We hurried from the hurtful realm of the
alien spacecraft and traversed the cold gap of space without ever
touching the gangway. Erin and Pete guided Frank's sleeping form
through the emptiness using skillful, complementary suit
maneuvering techniques. No one spoke. Nira and I clung together
like lovers. And in those fearful seconds in the empty, blackness
between ships, she became the most precious thing I had ever held.
Her heart was beating in my chest; her fear was in my mind.

We crossed over like a wounded pack of stray
dogs who had ventured down the street and into the neighbor's yard
only to be run off by buckshot. We were hurrying home now, to lick
our wounds in a place that was familiar, safe and warm.

Chapter 4

For the first time, the impersonal-gray
walls of my stateroom looked warm and inviting. Six hours of
grueling debriefing, replay after replay of every possible
helmet-cam view, and the telling and retelling of a chain of events
that seemed like a bad dream, had bottomed out my resolve. My mind
had turned to putty.

They had not been vindictive or accusing. I
was surprised by that. Even more surprising, they had been
sympathetic and restrained. "You handled it well, Adrian. It could
have been a lot worse, Adrian. Good thing you were close by,
Adrian."

The only consolation of it all was that my
presence at the inquiry put me at the receiving end of the
Captain's direct line to the med-lab. Both Nira and Frank were
reportedly doing very well. They would be okay.

Somehow, I had remained calm and collected
through it all. Inquisitions that come about as a result of a
serious near-miss can be intimidating, intense affairs. It wasn't
until my stateroom door had swished closed behind me that I finally
let out the backlog of tension. Leaning against the door, I stooped
over, stood brainless for a minute or two, and then finally slapped
at the sleep key on the wall by my sofa. Slumped over and morose, I
stared blankly as the hum from some hidden little motor came to
life, and the spongy orange couch flattened itself out into a bed.
There’s a special kind of desperate fear that waits for you to be
alone when you’ve almost lost someone.

I sat on the edge in the thinking man pose,
then, with the slow, deliberant march of a water buffalo chasing
away an intruding male, I went to the bathroom, knelt nobly beside
the toilet, and threw up everything in my stomach. The by-products
of too many cups of black coffee left dingy-black splatter marks
which I promptly flushed away for fear someone might inadvertently
notice them and realize how human I was after all. A quick swish of
mouthwash and a repulsive swallow of Dismal liquid and I was ready
for the bourbon. On the way to the bed, I fished the bottle from
the desk drawer, then plunked down against the soft pillows,
unzipped my clean gray coveralls to the chest, and began to unscrew
the cap when the door chime made its untimely 'ting'. I stuffed the
bottle between two cushions, but held to it for psychological
comfort.

"Yes?"

The door popped open and R.J. barged in. He
flopped down into the black, high-back seat by the desk and walked
it around to face me. He had changed into a blue, collared dress
shirt that was old and frayed. An antique pair of bifocals hung at
his chest from a black, nylon cord around his neck. His stretch
jeans were ancient and he wore white deck shoes with no socks. He
was tapping the eraser of a mechanical pencil against a crossword
puzzle taped to the back of an ultra-thin e-reader. He smiled
incorrigibly as he spoke. "Well, that was fun. What'd ya wanna do
now?"

"Have a stiff drink?"

"Well, I wish I could help you with that
one. I really do."

"You can, if you'll go into the bathroom and
get two plastic cups half full of cold water."

R.J.'s eyes lit up. He slapped his pencil
and reader down on the desk top, jumped up and returned a moment
later with the requested items. I poured the necessary additive and
he sat back in his seat and stared thoughtfully. "So, you appear no
worse for the wear, kebosabe."

"I have felt better."

"Things could have been much worse."

"So I've been told."

"What went wrong?"

"All things possible."

"They say Nira and Frank are both going to
be okay."

"Physiologically at least."

R.J. paused to sip from his cup. He eye'd me
appraisively. "It was quite a strange place over there, wouldn't
you say?"

"I understood very little of it. I would not
apply for a tour of duty. Have they come up with anything from the
data we brought back?"

"Oh yeah, the hand scanners did pick some
things. They are still arguing whether it is corrupted data or an
actual language. This is all privileged, by the way."

"What about the crap on the lower deck?"

"You mean the amazing goop? Well this will
get you. The scanners picked up intense levels of etheric, beta,
and mu energy. Plus some other unexpected stuff. Gobs of it in
fact, no pun intended."

"What are you talking about? You're saying
they picked up brain waves down there for Christ's sake?"

"Not brain waves, just high nueronic energy
levels. No patterns. Just flat-line levels of wave length. The
analysis group is working on it furiously. Brandon is behaving like
a kid in a candy store. That's really all I've heard. What about
you? Anything happen over there I haven't heard about?"

"Just one thing. You remember suiting me up
in the airlock?"

"Yeah..."

"I don't."

"What do you mean?" R.J. looked as though he
expected a punch line.

"I don't remember entering the airlock and I
don't remember leaving it. I take it you'll vouch for my having
been there."

"What are you talking about, Adrian. You
were Mr. Solemn and Serious as usual. All business, no fun. You
paraded around in there like Sergeant York. You even barked at me a
few times. I rejoiced when the helmet finally went over your head.
You don't remember any of that?"

"Not a thing."

"Have you been checked out by the
Doctor?"

"Who can find the time?"

"This is no joke, Adrian. You've got to get
checked out by the Doctor."

"He was just a tad busy with the mortally
wounded and all, R.J."

"Does the Captain know?"

"It came up at the debriefing but it seemed
incidental at the time."

"What did they say?"

"They said report to sick bay at the first
opportunity. I thought I'd go in the morning. I'd guess they're
still pretty busy down there."

R.J. sat back disconcertedly and took a
drink. The irreverent smirk abruptly returned to his face. "Well,
I've always said you were losing your mind."

"Oh right, that, coming from someone who had
to marry a psychologist."

R.J. slumped back further and drolled, "Yep,
she called it justifiable matrimony. She got to know me better than
I knew myself, so I figured I'd better marry her and find out what
the hell I was gonna do next."

I choked a little on my drink. "R.J. if
anyone around here is losing their mind it's you. You come in here
with an ancient pair of polished lenses hanging around your neck
when you know perfectly well any reputable eye surgeon would gladly
replace the lenses in your eyes."

"What? Do you think I want to be pasted and
glued together like you, oh scarred one? I bet if you ran naked
through the commissary someone would yell, “It's alive!"

"And not only that, you have an electronic
reader there that can display a thousand crossword puzzles that can
be done simply by touch, and yet you insist on going to the trouble
of printing one out and pasting it to the back of the thing. You
then proceed to solve it by wearing out erasers and pencils and
when it’s done, you unceremoniously throw it away. Why do you do
these things, R.J.?"

He was not swayed. He finished his drink,
stared righteously off into the distance. "Ah yes... there are some
things, my friend, that will never lend themselves to the compiled,
synthetic, emulated, compressed world of artificiality. This
featherweight electronic clipboard you refer to cannot display all
the clues at once and still show the puzzle. You cannot scribble
words in the margins and spaces very well. You cannot write your
uncertainties in the spaces lightly for consideration with the
alternate rows. I insist on tradition. I refuse to be digitized. It
is my own personal testament to human idiosyncrasy. We must not
forget our struggle from the primordial soup from which we
slithered. What if we suddenly no longer had access to the
monuments of progress we so worship? What if we no longer had
cyberspace, or computers, or automation, or farmbots or even the
omnipotent god, electricity itself? Could you survive, my
presumptuous friend? Have you ever read Burke? Could you operate
the simplest of life sustaining tools, the plow? Do you know
anything of soil, or grain, or planting, oh misguided
spaceman?"

"For Pete’s sake, R.J., I was raised on a
horse ranch. I spent my share of hours shoveling manure. I never
expected that when I got 20,000 light years away from the ranch I'd
have to listen to it."

"Horse ranch? A horse ranch, you say. I'd
forgotten that. Perhaps I've chosen the wrong discourse here. By
the way, do you have a ten letter word for givers of pain and
pleasure"?

"Commanders."

His eyes lit up. "It fits. I thought it was
prostitutes, but it can't be. You'd think it had to be something to
do with women."

"And if you were a woman, you would be
insisting no doubt that it must be something to do with men."

He smirked. "You are grumpy. I will take my
leave of you. In the morning things will look better to you.
Hopefully you will look better yourself."

R.J. jerked up out of his seat, plunked his
empty cup down on the desk and nearly walked into the sliding doors
before they could open. He turned in the open door, became
momentarily solemn, and said, "Good job out there, by the way," and
disappeared behind the automatic doors.

The bourbon was beginning to have a mildly
pleasant effect. I sank deeper into the pillows and considered the
glaring little blank spot inside my head, a minor gap in the
perpetual recording of my life. It was a constant nag, like the old
friend's name you can't quite remember, or the 'where you were
when' nemesis. There was one particular aspect of it that bothered
me the most. No matter how many times you venture outside a
spacecraft there is a certain, common, unforgettable moment that
takes place when you take that first step. For me it’s usually just
after I have closed the outer door of the airlock and the strict
disciplines of procedure have eased slightly. You turn and stare
out into the stars, into the unfathomable endlessness of it, and
your heart misses a beat. It is like stepping into God's stare. It
leaves a timeless impression.

I briefly looked over in the direction of
the shower and finished my drink. I debated sleep or shower. Sleep
was winning. A gentle haze of drowsiness began to seep into my
fractured mind. My hands rested on my chest with the empty cup
tipped sideways in them. My head rolled involuntarily to the left
in the caress of the pillow-cushion.

The door chime went ‘tong’.

"Yes?"

When the gray doors hissed open, I couldn't
help the double take. From 'blank stare' to 'can't be' to 'damn it
is' to 'my god, how can it be'. Maybe that's a double-double take.
Frank Parker stood out in the corridor with a pinched expression
and evasive eyes. He wore a fresh pair of light blue coveralls,
unzipped at the top with a dark blue turtle neck underneath. He
tapped nervously with his right hand at the side of his leg. He
looked like a man standing on an ant hill.

"Frank, what the hell are you doing out of
sick-bay?"

He started to answer, then suddenly stopped,
then started again, and stopped again.

I straightened up and leaned back against
the wall, still holding the empty plastic cup. "Come in here and
shut the door, for Christ's sake."

He started to speak and stopped again. He
forced himself in. The double doors swished shut behind him.

"What are you doing out of sick-bay. How'd
you get past the staff?"

"I'm sorry, Adrian. I shouldn't be here.
It's late. It's been a long god-damned day. I'll just go and come
back at some better time."

"Sit down."

He began to pace back and forth in front of
me in the small space of my cabin. He was having trouble finding
words. "I don't get it, Adrian. I've gone over it a hundred times
in my head. Nothing makes any sense at all. It was a fuck-up, pure
and simple. It's got me all corrupted in the head. I can't sort it
out. What the hell happened?"

"You tell me."

"I forgot to scan that container. How could
I do that? If I had, they say it would've measured intense radiant
energy. All kinds of unknowns. I wouldn't have opened it. It was
hands off, anyway. What the hell was I thinking? I don't break EVA
rules. I never break EVA rules. I know better."

"Sounds to me like you know what
happened."

He looked at me defensively, but guilt gave
way to regret. "Jesus, I caused a suit tear. It's a miracle she's
still alive. I just thought it should start with you, I mean, the
long apology. The one that lasts a lifetime. You'll probably never
want to work with me again."

"Well, maybe I would now."

He looked at me as though it was a cruel
remark. "What are you saying?"