Warp Speed (18 page)

"Let's worry about that later. We've got to get out of the path of that thing," I said and I began looking around. There didn't seem to be any place to go that would offer shelter. A pine tree zipped past us at fifty miles per hour.

"That way!" Tabitha pointed in a direction that appeared to be orthogonal or at a ninety-degree angle to the direction of the tornado's path. The hope was to not be in front of the tornado when it passed by. The tornado was maybe a quarter mile away from us and was cruising at probably forty miles per hour. No way we could outrun it. Maybe we had time to get out of its way. We started running. Fast! Tabitha clutched her side as she ran.

Lightning struck to my right about ten meters away.

"Shit! That was close!" I said.

"Shut up and run!" Tabitha was holding her left side. She had said she thought her ribs were cracked. It had to hurt but worry or talking about it couldn't help the pain and staying here in front of that tornado was not an option either of us liked.

We ran hard through an endless pine thicket just ahead of the sound of breaking trees and limbs. I soon realized that this was no natural thicket. The trees were all about the same age and they were all growing in lines. We were in a timber company's pine grove--and fortunate for our bare feet that there was a nice sandy path between each row of pines.

I looked over my shoulder and noticed that the large tornado had spun off three smaller ones that were in a merry-go-round circling it. The large central storm had to be a four on the Fujita scale at least. Maybe even an F-five.

We came to a small creek that cut through the pine grove. We were running too fast to stop easily so Tabitha and I jumped and landed right in the middle of it. Fortunately the creek bed was sandy or we could've twisted or broken feet and ankles. The creek wasn't more than knee deep in water, but the banks were five or six feet high.

"Let's dig in right here," I yelled. The wind was still so loud we could barely hear one another.

"Good. I can't run much more." She gasped holding her side.

We crawled up as close to the bank of the creek as we could and grabbed onto anything we could hold. The lightning was getting closer and the sound of the storm was getting louder. I thought of rising up and looking over the embankment, but then a tree trunk whooshed by inches above the ground. It would have taken my head off. I hunkered down and stayed put. Those tornadoes were only a quarter of a mile or so away and I never once heard the sounds of a damn freight train. All I could hear was an intense wind and the sound of trees breaking. There was thunder, but no freight train.

The storm turned away from the crash site and away from us. As the tornado sounds got further and further away I decided to brave a peek over the edge of the creek bank. I could see the tornadoes ripping through the trees in the distance.

"I think we're out of the woods for now." I stood and offered Tabitha a hand. I looked around and remembered that we were actually in the woods and laughed at the pun.

"What a day." She grabbed and kissed me hard. "That's for marrying me." She kissed me again. "That's for getting us back to Earth alive." She kissed me once more and said, "That, is just for the hell of it."

I gazed into her eyes and commented on how beautiful she looked.

"Phew! You're blind." She shrugged.

I started to respond to her when the world suddenly started spinning. I tried to keep focused on Tabitha's face, but I couldn't. Everything spun around and around as if I was on a merry-go-round moving at fifty miles per hour. Then I lost my balance and fell sideways into the creek. I struggled to keep my head above the water level, but I had no connection to what up or down was. My sense of direction had completely vanished. Tabitha pulled my head above the water and grunted from the painful effort.

"Anson, what's wrong?"

I was able to make it onto all fours with my face slightly above the water. Then I vomited violently. Tabitha didn't move. She made sure my head stayed above the water. Several dry heaves later the nausea subsided somewhat and I was able to get to my feet with Tabitha's help.

"Your inner ear isn't used to the gravity yet," Tabitha told me. "That happened to me the first couple of times." She tried not to laugh. "Can you stand on your own?"

"Sure I can." She let go of my shoulders and I fell flat on my face. This time I was able to pull myself from the water without her help. I rested on all fours for a couple of minutes. "Just give me a minute or two. How long does this take to pass?" I cupped creek water in my hands and splashed it in my face several times.

"It took me a good couple of hours before I felt okay the first time. But some people it never bothers. Motion sickness is weird that way. Take your time. What else have we got to do?"

We sat at the edge of the creek for another ten or fifteen minutes while I regained my equilibrium. I should have realized that I would be affected. I had such a hard time adjusting from gravity to microgravity that it just makes sense that I would have some difficulty with the reverse process as well.

"This is about like getting the drunk spins. Did you ever get so blasted that all you could do is just lie on the bed with one foot hanging off and stare at the ceiling? You know that if you move you'll throw up."

"I did a few times in undergraduate school and when I was accepted into the astronaut program," she replied. "I had an inner ear infection once in high school that made me just as sick. I remember sleeping in the bathroom because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to make it there if need be."

"Yeah. I had an ear infection like that once. That's exactly how this feels. It is slowly subsiding though." I shook my head hard a few times hoping to reset my inner ear. The first time I did it I thought I was going to heave again. The second time the spins stopped. I saw stars for a split second and then I was better. "That is much better," I told Tabitha.

"What are you doing?" she laughed.

"Trying to reset my inner ear gyroscope system. Friday does it whenever she falls a long distance or gets tumbled. I figured if it works for cats, why not humans?"

Tabitha laughed at me and said, "I've heard flight surgeons suggest that to folks before, but I've never seen anybody do it." She laughed again, "You're weird."

"Well, it seems to have helped." I stood up with no help.

I reached to my EMU pockets and realized that I wasn't wearing my EMU.

"Tabitha. We have to go check out the probe." We helped each other out of the creek bed. I will always remember thinking that we must have been quite the sight, two people wearing white Spandex long underwear, covered with mud, soaking wet, and traipsing practically barefoot through the woods. We basically had no survival tools other than ourselves, a wrecked spacecraft, a few multi-million dollar hand tools that would only fit the million-dollar bolts on that spacecraft, and two highly damaged spacesuits at our disposal.

We made our way through the debris, backtracking the hundred or so meters we had covered while running from the storm. Tabitha picked up a hailstone that must have been the size of a softball. It was beginning to melt in the heat.

"Have you ever seen a hailstone this large?"

"Nope. I've also never seen a tornado that size."

"Yeah," she replied. "It was an F-five I'll bet."

"Uh huh! How are your ribs?"

"I don't think they're broken. But I guarantee they're bruised badly."

As we approached the probe I noticed a very very low pitched humming sound. I found my EMU and dug out the engagement ring. I took Tabitha's left hand and put it on her ring finger. I got down on one knee.

"Marry me," I said.

"Get up idiot. I already said yes." She pulled me up. "Besides, we need to figure out where we are."

The sun poked out from behind the clouds and rays of sunlight filtered through the pine trees. It was good old Sol all right--I could tell by the color. Any fantasies about having warped off to some other planet had been parlayed.

"Earth," I said.

"What?"

"We're on Earth. That is where we are." I held up my hands as if to encompass the world.

"Smartass. I know this is Earth. But where on Earth? I never saw a pine thicket like this in New Mexico." Tabitha rested her right hand on her hip and cocked her head sideways like she always does when she is being a smartass in return.

There was a path a half of a mile wide south of us that had been cleared away by the tornadoes. I knew which direction it was now that the sun was out.

"You're right. This ain't New Mexico. Reminds me of southern Alabama," I replied.

The humming sound got louder.

Tabitha and I poked around the probe trying to determine where it was coming from. First we tried the comm system. It had been crushed completely by debris or landing--it was difficult to determine which. Tabitha pulled a limb out of ECC number three, the one that was damaged the most. The humming got louder and turned to a buzzing.

"Holy crap! The sound is coming from the ECC!" I looked at Tabitha. She looked back at me with a horrified expression on her face.

CHAPTER 11

How long, Anson?"

I plowed through the wreckage looking for the precise origin point of the sound. "Dig the batteries out of the science suite if they are still intact," I told her.

I found the general area where I thought the sound was coming from and tried to isolate a subset of circuit boards. The horrified looks we had had on our faces were warranted. The Casimir effect energy devices were oscillating asymmetrically. In other words, the Clemons Dumbbells were going chaotic. Not just a few of them like the ones that destroyed the bathroom at the manufacturing facility or the handful that injured 'Becca. The amplitude of the buzzing sound implied hundreds of thousands of these things could go. I started doing the math in my head. If all of them went at one time, the explosion would be bigger than Hiroshima or if I slipped a zero or two, which I often do without paper and pencil, much bigger than Hiroshima. Of course, it had occurred to all of us working the project from day one, that we were dealing with much larger than nuclear-explosion levels of power. That is why the ECCs were to never be activated until we were in space. The conventional propulsion system on the probe was to take it up to about a thousand kilometer orbit and there we would turn them on.

"Only one of the batteries is still operational, Anson. How long till it blows? Answer me!" Tabitha implored.

"Bring it over here. And I'm working on it." I ripped some cabling from the probe. I fumbled through my EMU and found the Swiss Army knife that all astronauts are issued. I stripped off the ends of two wires and tied them to the battery poles. Then I stripped the other ends and shunted across a section of the Clemons Dumbbells. The buzzing returned back to a humming. The battery was drained completely.

"Shit! That battery wasn't enough. This thing is going to blow, in like, an hour or so. If we can't find a power source to overload the Clemons Dumbbells in the ECCs, they get stuck in that positive feedback loop and will eventually go big bang!" I said.

"There's nothing else we can do? Is there no other spacecraft power system?"

"Sure. The ECCs delivered all the power we needed, but they're fried and this one is about to go kablooie!" I shrugged my shoulders and did an explosion gesture with my hands.

"What about that one?" Tabitha pointed at good old ECC number two. The one we had used as a shield from the hail.

I ran to the diagnostic panel on the side of it and tore off the plate. Tabitha grabbed her electric ratchet and started in on the bolts. In a few short seconds we were peering at a perfectly good cube of Clemons Dumbbells. I shorted the breaker, which in turn kicked the dumbbells loose. The ECC started producing power. Then an arc jumped out of it and tossed me about four meters away from it. Smoke and sparks poured out of the cube. Tabitha ran to my side and helped me to my feet.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah," I shook the numbness out of my hands. "Oh well. That's that, I guess. I can't stop the cube from blowing now."

"How big will it be?" Tabitha was scared. She looked even more scared than she had when the Shuttle exploded.

"Judging from the size of the area that's humming, I would guess that in about two hours or so everything within a radius of about ten miles from where we're standing will be totally destroyed. That is only a guess mind you. About two times as big as Hiroshima comes to mind however." I looked south at the pathway the tornadoes had cleared for us.

"Anson, are you sure we can't stop it?"

"Yes. Hell I wish we could just hit the damn thing with a rock and get it over with, but that might trigger more of the dumbbells to go chaotic and make the thing blow up sooner and bigger!"

"Then I guess we have no choice but to run! Let's go." She started to take off.

"Hold on," I grabbed her by the wrist. "Get your water bag out of your EMU first."

"Good thinking." She nodded.

I was thirsty and borderline dehydrated and needed to drink--being sick earlier hadn't helped either. We tore the PLSS backpacks apart and dug out our water supplies. They were about a third full each. Better than nothing. I fashioned some straps from the backpack material and we tied the bags on to our backs. The plastic tubes from the bags we threw over our shoulder so we could grab it and drink from it whenever we pleased.

"Just like my water pack for my mountain bike gear," I told Tabitha.

Tabitha also grabbed the Velcro NASA mission patches off our suits. "We should have some sort of visible identification other than just my dog tags," she said.

"Ready. Now, can you run with your ribs?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm just a little sore. Are you going to make it? Any more dizziness?"

"I'm fine. Let's get out of here," I responded.

"Which way?" she asked as she scanned the area.

"Path of least resistance," I said pointing to the tornado's track.

We started running at a slow pace and watching our footing. At least we were on sand. The Spandex footies in the LCVGs helped some. I wish we would've had shoes.