Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“ What! ” Mehmet and I simultaneously yelled. We were still three and a half hours short of a safe leap point!

But Dixon laughed as he switched on the field.

“Thy will be done!” he hollered as we plunged into the pit.

Angela:

Purple lightening prickled up and down the Defiant ’s pylons, and the stars all around it shuddered like a mirage. Our vehicle shook violently, its metal groaning with the strain as it was sucked towards the artificial gravity the galactic ship was generating. And then suddenly the stars and moon and sun and earth all vanished and all around us, in every direction, was something like a huge distorting mirror. It was like when you’re under water and look up and you can’t see the sky or the world outside, only the silvery undersides of waves. Our own faces were there in front of us, little distorted reflections of our frightened faces maybe fifty yards away, peering back at us from a distorted reflection of our cabin window. There was a jolt like an explosion and I vaguely remember hearing a hissing noise coming from somewhere and Mike giving out a despairing groan. Then I blacked out

When I came round again I was in the Defiant , and those three famous galactonauts were looking guiltily down at me like naughty little boys who’ve done a stupid dare and it’s gone wrong.

“Hi, you okay? Listen, I’m…”

“Where’s Mike?”

“Your partner? He’s okay. He’s not come round yet, but he’s okay. Listen, I’m Mehmet Harribey and…”

“…and I’m Dixon Thorley.”

“…and I’m…”

“I know. You’re Tommy Schneider. The famous love rat.”

My head was killing me, and I was very scared and feeling sick, but I was damned if I was going to show any sign of weakness.

“I meant to leap before you got too close to us,” said Dixon, “but I must have left it too late because we pulled your interceptor vehicle through sub-E with us. It was very badly damaged but the three of us came over and managed to get you and your crewmate out before the pressure dropped too low.”

“So we did complete the leap then?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid we’re kind of…”

“So where the hell are we?”

“Well, we’re…”

“The truth is,” Mehmet said, “that we don’t exactly know. We’re in intergalactic space, I’m afraid, which… um… is kind of a first. But we believe that the nearest galaxy is our own. So it should still be possible to…um…”

“…to get back to Earth and not suffocate or freeze to death in space – although that is the most likely outcome. Is that how it is?”

“Well, yes, I’m afraid so,” Mehmet laughed ruefully. (I grew to like him best of the three. He was nice-looking, had natural friendly manners, and didn’t come with a reputation either as a religious nut or a serial adulterer. I remembered seeing a photo of him in some magazine with a pretty wife by the Aegean somewhere and three or four pretty little Turkish kids.)

I looked around. The cramped little cabin was about as big as the back of a small delivery truck and it smelled like the boys’ changing room at school, but as far as we knew it was the only habitable place for thousands and thousands of light years: the only place in which a human being could remain intact and alive even for a single second.

“You arseholes,” I told the three of them, and I felt like I was a copper back on the streets of London, pulling up three silly naughty little boys. “You selfish, childish, thoughtless little arseholes.”

They never had a chance to respond because suddenly Mike screamed. He’d opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was the wheel of the galaxy outside the porthole.

Tommy:

It was pure hell there for a while. The British guy hollered and roared and grabbed us and snatched at the controls and swore and wept. I got a black eye, Mehmet got his shirt torn, Angela was yelling at us to back off and not make things even worse (but where the hell were we supposed to back off to ?) and all of us were getting dangerously close to seeing ourselves just like the Englishman saw us: doomed, doomed to die slowly and horribly in a stuffy tin can with nothing but nothingness outside.

Eventually Dixon managed to get to the medical box and whack a sedative into the guy’s ass.

“He’s afraid of space,” Angela explained as he slumped down.

“A space-cop who’s afraid of space? ”

Even Angela reluctantly laughed.

I’d never gone for black girls particularly before, but I found myself noticing that this was one attractive young woman. She was tough, and funny, and sharp – and she looked great. Maybe this was what I’d been looking for all this time, I couldn’t help thinking (as, God help me, I’d thought so many times before). Maybe I’d just been looking in the wrong place?

Yeah, I know, I know. We were in a damaged ship in intergalactic space and so far from home that, if we could pick out our own sun in that billion-star wheel, we’d be seeing it as it was back in the Pleistocene era. And yet even then I was thinking about sex. I guess that is what you call an obsession.

I mean we had a month’s supplies at most. Maybe six week’s oxygen.

But I caught her eye anyway and smiled at her, just to let her know she was appreciated.

Angela:

It turned out that their stupid leap had not only sucked through our interceptor and turned it into scrap, it had also damaged the Defiant itself. Because they’d made the leap too early the artificial gravity of the field had been pulled back toward the Earth by real gravity – that was why Mike and I had been caught inside it. Some of the pylons at the front end of the ship had actually remained outside of the field, and so literally ceased to exist, while others further back had been bent and twisted. This was very bad news. To get home from this distance would take a minimum of three or four leaps, which was pushing things at the best of times, even without a defective engine.

So Dixon, Mehmet and Tommy suited up and went outside to see what repairs they could make, Tommy cheesily asking me if I was sure I’d be okay minding the fort and keeping an eye on Mike. Can you believe that he’d already given me the eye several times? Was this bloke entirely ruled by his dick?

“I’ll be okay,” I said, “and I promise not to answer the phone or to let in any strangers.”

Answer the phone! Even if my mum and dad could have called me up from Earth – even if there was a signal strong enough to reach this far, I mean – I’d have been dead a million years by the time their message got to me.

Pretty soon all three gallant galactonauts were back. They’d been able to straighten out a few bent pylons. But now something else was on their minds and they rushed to the sensor panel and started playing around with frequencies and filters like kids with a new video game.

“There was this dark disc in front of the galaxy,” Tommy explained to me eventually, “Mehmet spotted it first…”

“Never seen anything like it!” Mehmet interrupted. “It was…”

“Here it is!” called Dixon, pointing to a screen.

He’d used radar on whatever it was and it turned out to be a solid object the size of earth, a planet in other words.

“There’s a thing called the Ballantyne effect,” Mehmet explained to me. “A ship’s trajectory through sub-E space is always twisted in the direction of any large mass that’s in the vicinity of its notional exit point. It means that you always end up nearer to stars that you would predict on chance alone. But who’d have thought there would be any sort of object out here to pull us towards it, eh?”