David Alexander: Tramp

Illustrated by Randy Asplund-Faith

I could feel the off-balance tremor of the displacers through the soles of my feet as I worked my way down the cabin-way on the Orion ’s starboard side. Every thirty-three feet I had to duck my head to clear the blow-out hatches Captain O’Bannion had been forced to install on Carlon’s World before the underwriters would let us break orbit. The welder’s beads where the modules were jammed against the deck plates still glinted a clean blue-black, as yet free of the verdigris that tattooed the rest of the ship.

The Orion was typical of the freighters plying the ports of the Middle and Outer Rings. She sported twin Murray Hi-Twist Injectors to warp the ship into Non-E where six GMF 4100 displacers maneuvered her at a cruising Equivalent Velocity of about one light-year per standard day, more or less. In the Orion ’s case it was usually less as the synchronization of displacers two and five had degraded to 3 percent below book specs before Calipha’s incantations had finally seemed to take hold.

According to the chron we should have been about 200 hours out of Coffernam, but judging by the buzz I was now detecting in the plates and the asymmetric shudder which had begun to torque the frames if you knew just where to look, I guessed that Calipha’s magics were losing their potency and that our laboring displacers were again creeping to a higher level of distortion.

Today I was on the Charlie Watch, noon to eighteen hundred hours, with Adrian Mandell.

“Any traffic?” I asked Mandell as I took my place at the con.

“No, sir.”

I would have been shocked had he said anything else. Nothing short of a military ship running high cycles in our immediate “vicinity” (though in Non-E there is no real physical location, which is why it’s called Non-Euclidean Space) could have punched a message through to us. The first two hours of my watch were uneventful, as expected. The Prox would sound an alarm if anything came close enough to distort our bubble, the chances of which were about the same as two men three miles apart firing rifles in each other’s direction and having the bullets collide in mid-flight.

The real reason for our watches was to guard against power failure, desynchronization, or the most feared, fire. Anything will burn if you get it hot enough—aluminum, even steel. This was a cargo ship, which meant it contained motors, cranes, cables, hydraulic lines, and power connections, all of which could leak, spark, and overheat. If, God help us, a fire started in the engineering decks or the crew quarters, we would have to control it fast or face death by burning, death by smoke inhalation, or death by oxygen deprivation, the operative word in each case being “death.”

So, naturally, when the alarm sounded my first thought was, “Oh my God, we’ve got a fire!” and I immediately looked at the ship’s interior schematic for the location of the blaze, but the view was clear—no smoke, no hot spots. It was only then that I turned back to the general data screen and studied the red letters which now filled the plate:

Desynchronization Alert

Displacement Units Two and Five are now 4 percent out of synchronization and climbing. At present rate of decline, loss of Non-E space capability is anticipated in approximately 5.3 minutes.

“Turn that damn thing off!” I shouted to Mandell as I punched up Calipha’s code.

The alarm cut off, and after four rings the engineer’s sing-song voice blared in my ear: “I know, I know,” he shouted. “I’m doing the best I can!”

“Can you get them back into line?”

“I don’t have a crystal ball, for Christ’s sake! The damn things are fifty years old!”

“Look, Calipha, you’ve got three minutes or I’m going to have to drop us out. If we’re still under power when we top 5 percent—”

“Don’t you think I know that? Now let me do my job!”

“If I don’t see stabilization in two minutes-thirty,” I said punching up a real time display of the percentage variance, “I’m going to start powering down.” My earpiece was silent for half a beat, then, in a resigned tone, Calipha said “Understood,” and punched out.

“Get the captain down here,” I ordered Mandell without turning my head from the slowly increasing numbers on the plate—4.21 percent, 4.23 percent, 4.25 percent. Whatever Calipha was trying, it wasn’t working. A few moments later the alarm began to beep again.

“Damn it, Mandell, I told you to shut that damn thing off!”

“Don’t blame me!” he growled, “Look at your board.”

A new red lettered message had now appeared on the secondary monitor:

Collision Alert

An object has made contact with the exterior of the bubble. Analysis indicates metallic-ceramic composition. Object’s course —

Then the message flickered once and disappeared, replaced by the plate’s normal power generation figures and ship’s housekeeping information.

“Did you turn that off?” I asked, turning to Mandell.

“I didn’t touch it.”

“Well, what the hell—”

At that instant, the warning reappeared and the alarm began again. This time it lasted barely two seconds before flickering away.

“Mandell, punch the damn Prox system up on your plate and see if you can figure out what the hell’s happening,” I shouted, then turned back to my main display. The levels were not only still rising, the rate of desynchronization was increasing: 4.69; 4.72; 4.76.

“I’m shutting her down,” I called out and keyed the intercom. “Prepare for emergency drop-out. All hands: emergency drop-out commencing in fifteen seconds.”

“Dondero, what the hell’s going on?” I jerked around and saw Dennis O’Bannion swinging through the hatch. Dressed only in a hastily pulled on pair of jeans and a T-shirt, Captain O’Bannion’s face was puffy with sleep. He had pulled the Alpha shift, midnight to six A .M.,and had probably gone to bed no more than four or five hours before.

“The displacers are crashing, Captain,” I called, turning back to the controls. “Calipha can’t hold them. We’re already 4.91 percent out of sync.” As I spoke I selected the “Emergency Drop-out” command with a ten-second delay, typed in my Command Authorization Code and hit the “Accept & Activate” pad.

“Jesus!” I heard the Old Man hiss, but I was too busy to deal with him at that point. My plate changed to a green and white color scheme to indicate that my command had been accepted and the system began to echo the countdown over the ship’s intercom.

“Drop-out in ten seconds.”

“Drop-out in nine seconds.”

The Captain hurried to the first officer’s chair and activated the restraints. The day before we were finally able to break orbit from Carlon’s World, our First Officer, Lin Chang, had come down with a case of measles and was barred from rejoining the ship. So now the ship’s principal officers consisted of just the captain, Mandell, Calipha, Everson, the navigator, and the ship’s second officer, me. I hit the button on my own chair and gallons of putty-like sludge were sucked from the tank beneath the deck and pumped into a series of bladders that expanded over my arms, legs, chest, and almost completely around my neck and head.

When the countdown reached three seconds, the data plate suddenly lit up for the third time with a collision alert, but this time the alarm did not flicker and disappear. Instead, overlaid against the computer’s drone—“Drop-out in three seconds.—Drop-out in two seconds.”—was the warbling beep beep beep of the Prox monitor, drawing our attention to the message’s glowing red characters.