Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

I gave a bark of loud triumphant laughter. The stranger shivered. It was getting cold and he had only his jeans and his torn shirt, while I had my jumper and my sensible green anorak. I suppose my thought was that when I’d finished tearing his dreams to shreds, I would offer him a bed for the night.

“That’s biology for you, mate.” I chuckled grimly. “That’s life. Not harmony and resolution, not peace – just conflict and desperation and struggle …”

Suddenly he winced. Ah good, I thought, I’ve made him cry.

But no, that wasn’t it. It was nothing to do with me. He winced again, gave a groan – then grabbed out wildly at the air.

Slow-witted as I am, it was only at that moment that I realised what was happening.

“No!” I found myself crying out. “Don’t leave me! Please! I didn’t mean…”

But it was too late. He was gone. There was a popping sound as the air rushed into the empty space. And then: nothing, no trace of him, only a faint electric smell.

I was alone. It was growing dark. A cold wind had begun to blow through the branches above my head.

“Come back!” I cried into the empty little wood.

It was pointless of course. He was somewhere else entirely.

He was searching for Jazamine in the green wood.

He was falling. He was falling through the worlds.

Tommy:

Space is a very dangerous place but for me personally it always felt like a safe haven. And especially this time. In the final days before our mission, it seemed to me, just about every newspaper and TV station on the planet had been carrying revelations from Yvette. I couldn’t pull back a curtain without a storm of flashbulbs and a chorus of voices. I couldn’t pass a newsstand without seeing my own name:

Tommy Schneider’s Ex Tells All

Sex-Mad Schneider Broke my Heart

The void between the stars, sub-Euclidean nothingness, life in a metal box with nothing but vacuum beyond its thin skin – all that was fine with me. It always had been fine. Living in space was simple and straightforward compared to trying to live on earth. But now it was beginning to look as if this sanctuary of mine would soon be closed off.

“I think this could be one of the last trips before they shut down the program, yes?” said my crewmate Mehmet Haribey on the shuttle out.

He was a Turkish Air Force officer. We usually had one non-American seeing as the program was nominally international. I’d worked with Mehmet several times before and liked him. He was an open sort of guy, and he had warmth.

“I guess, but I so hope not,” I said. “Who in God’s name would I be if I had to spend my life on Earth?

Mehmet grunted sympathetically.

“Or it would be one of the last trips,” said our captain, Dixon Thorley, “if it wasn’t for the fact that this time we are going to find life.”

Mehmet and I exchanged glances. Dixon Thorley was okay when he was just being himself, but he found it very hard to forget that God Almighty had called him personally to carry the good news of Jesus Christ to alien civilizations. It was a tale he had told to many a rapt congregation and many a respectful interviewer on the religious networks: God had put him on Earth to perform this one task. And for him it was just inconceivable that the program could end without contact with any other life form.

Poor guy, I suddenly thought. He’s in for quite a fall.

The fact was that over two hundred fantastically expensive missions had traversed the galaxy and found no trace of any living thing. Human beings had trodden lifeless planets right across the Milky Way and now it looked as if their footprints would just fill up with stardust again. Silence would return like nightfall to all those empty solar systems whose planets held nothing but rock and gas and ice and sterile water.

I say ‘like nightfall’, but really it’s not the right word to use because of course in any solar system it’s really always daytime, always sunny everywhere, except in the tiny slivers of space that lie on the lee side of planets, and in the even more miniscule areas on planetary surfaces that are cut off from the light by clouds. As we approached it in the shuttle, the galactic ship Defiant basked ahead of us in a perpetual noontime, an enormous cylinder half a kilometre long, covered in gigantic pylons that made it look like some kind of weird spiny sea-slug. It was huge, but 99% of it was engine. The habitable portion was a cramped little cabin in the middle. We crawled through into it from the shuttle, closed the airlock doors behind us, and gratefully breathed in the familiar space smell of dirty socks, stale urine and potato mash. How I loved that smell! It was the smell of freedom. It was like coming home.

“God I’ll miss this,” I said as I began switching on monitors.

(I’ve been thinking about this recently – I’ve had a lot of time to think – and what I’ve come to realize is that I have always been most at home in transient, and dangerous places. Even when I was a kid, danger was always somehow reassuring to me. Safety and security always made me feel uneasy and afraid.)

Dixon flicked the radio on to a county music station and we settled into our positions and started running through the pre-activation procedures. Soon we’d start the ship’s gravitonic engine and then we’d head out into deeper space while the engine built up power for the leap. Finally – blam! – we’d let it loose. In a single gigantic surge of energy it would drive us out in a direction that was perpendicular to all three dimensions of Euclidian space. A few seconds later, we’d bob up again like a cork. We’d be back in Euclidean space but we’d be a thousand light-years away from home.

“The spaceman who wrecked my life,” said the radio, “New revelations from Yvette Schneider! Exclusively in tomorrow’s Daily Lance.”

“Poor Tommy,” Mehmet said. “You can’t get away from it, can you?”

Dixon gave a snort, but refrained from saying anything. He’d already told me that as far as he was concerned I’d only got what I deserved. And of course he was right. I didn’t expect sympathy. But I couldn’t help responding to the self-righteous baying of the radio ad.

“There’s always another side to the story,” I muttered. “I behaved badly, yes. But there were things she did too.”

This was too much for Dixon.

“Tommy, you just can’t…”

But he was interrupted by a voice from Mission Control.

“Tommy, Dixon, Mehmet, this is going to come as a shock…”

It was Kate Grantham, the director of the Galaxy Project, in person.

“The mission is cancelled boys. The whole project has been terminated. Sorry, but the President has decided to pull the plug, and as the US funds 95% of the project, that means the end of the project itself. We all knew this was likely to happen soon but I’m afraid it’s happening now. The shuttle is coming back for you. Please shut all systems down again with immediate effect. The Defiant will be mothballed pending further decisions.”

“But excuse me the project has barely started!” Mehmet protested. “ Of course we haven’t found life yet. Doesn’t the President know how big space is? The galaxy would have to have been bursting at the seams with life for us to have found it already.”

“The President has been thoroughly briefed,” the director said shortly. “He has a number of competing priorities to consider.” And she couldn’t help adding: “The bad publicity around Tommy hasn’t helped.”

“Oh that is logical!” I burst out. “One of the explorers gets caught cheating on his wife, so cancel the exploration of the entire galaxy.”