Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

Jared pounded on the control panel of the decompression chamber and called Morgan’s name over and over. Baz joined him, pushing at the chamber’s sliding door as if he could open it with brute force. Impossible, of course, with the difference in air pressure. Mitchell had stopped in the doorway; Keesey pushed him aside.

“Oh no,” she breathed, her voice thick with despair.

Jared said, “He locked up the controls and pumped out all the air. I couldn’t do anything. I tried, but I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t.”

Keesey’s face was twisted into an expression that might have been a comforting smile, or suppressed grief. She rested her forehead against the window. “Where is Doctor Dalton? Is he all right?”

Jared pointed back to where Dalton was sitting on the floor holding a cold compress to his head.

Mitchell’s feet were leaden as he moved toward the chamber door. He’d come this far. He had to see.

The chamber was a gray room, large enough for a stretcher. Morgan lay on the floor, curled in fetal position, naked. His hospital jumpsuit was tangled around his feet. The half-light that entered the chamber through the window cast weird shadows over him. His skin looked silver, painted with the dark splotches of burst blood vessels. His brown hair, haloed around his bent head, looked silver. He was hugging himself, as if this was what he’d wanted.

“Why?” Mitchell asked, his hand on the door, like he could reach through, reach him. Keesey said, “The air against his skin was screaming. He felt the air and heard it as screaming. He was trying to get away from the screaming.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. All people had to do to kill themselves in space was let the air out. It was so easy.

“Good,” Keesey said.

“What is he doing here?” Dalton said from across the room, pointing at Mitchell.

Keesey went over to him and commenced a hushed conversation, but at the last exchange Dalton’s voice carried.

“It’s cruel giving them hope, Ava!”

“Hush!” she hissed back.

Baz stayed with Mitchell, who stared through the window at the man lying curled in the gray shadows.

Morgan turned his head. His eyes opened and met Mitchell’s gaze. He blinked, and movement trembled along his arm.

“He isn’t dead.” Mitchell pressed both fists to the door and lurched forward until his nose touched the window. “He moved, he’s alive!”

Baz looked. “He hasn’t moved.”

“He did!”

Morgan brushed his hand along his cheek, tugging open his mouth, which was dark, bottomless and dark, like a black hole. “Open the door! He’s alive!”

Baz took hold of his shoulders and pinned him to the wall next to the hyperbaric chamber. Keesey stood in front of him. Mitchell hadn’t seen her approach.

“Mitchell, what did you see? Tell me what you saw.”

“There isn’t time, we have to save him, we have to—”

“It’s too late, Mitchell.” She held his cheeks in her hands. “Tell me what you saw.”

He wanted to pull away from them, their oppressive touches. He wanted to put space between them, because he didn’t trust them. But Baz held him firmly against the wall, and Keesey immobilized his face so he couldn’t look away. His throat tightened, and a primitive voice inside him tried to whimper.

“What did you see?”

He swallowed to clear his throat. “He turned his face. He looked at me. I saw his eyes; there was life in them.”

“Baz, are his eyes open?”

“No, doctor.”

“Mitchell, think about it. Does that seem possible? There’s no air in that chamber.”

Logic said no. Common sense said no. He swallowed again, this time to quell a growing nausea. He saw what he saw. She was asking him to deny the truth of his own observation. He said, “The M-drive isn’t supposed to be possible. But it is.”

Keesey held one of his arms, Baz held the other. Their grips were tight; he couldn’t get away from them. If he could just get to Morgan, he’d show them. He lurched, writhed, strained to escape. Keesey pinned his upper arm between her arm and body, pulled up his sleeve, and slapped a patch on his wrist. Immediately a flush like warm syrup flowed up his arm, to his heart, to his head. His knees buckled. She and Baz lowered him to the floor.

A Keesey-shaped shadow knelt by him. She brushed her hand over his face, touching his eyes, closing his eyelids for him, and the world was dark. “Go to sleep, Mitchell. Just go to sleep.”

Mitchell worked to move his lips, to say something, to scream, to curse them. To curse them for being right.

… an hour later he was screaming about flying monkeys to starboard…

Space could be described in terms of numbers and colors. Hydrogen burned orange, helium glowed red. But when the colors were wrong, he—

He couldn’t remember.

He awoke in his quarters, his cell, lying on the bed. When he sat up, his belly lurched sickeningly, and he lay back down. He had seen a dead man move, and it hadn’t been real.

At least, they told him it hadn’t been real.

A navigator told the captain what departure matrices to use. They were invisible, regions in space identified only by the navigator. The captain trusted him to know the way. Captain Scott had always trusted him. He was used to being trusted. He was used to seeing what others couldn’t. To doubt this, to doubt that he could see what others couldn’t—he could never trust himself again.

Morgan had been trying to tell him something. That last look he had given him, those wide-open eyes. If Morgan had wanted to kill himself, there were easier ways.

He wondered what was under Jaspar’s helmet. How had he tried to kill himself?

But what if Morgan hadn’t been trying to kill himself? He’d gone to that specific place, like it was one end of a set of coordinates of a journey he’d plotted. That was the matrix he’d found; he’d needed to launch himself from there to get to the place he really wanted to be—away from here. The jump hadn’t worked. That happened sometimes.

Morgan had tried traveling without a ship, and he’d sent Mitchell a message. Looked in his eyes and told him, it almost worked . They could see what no one else could.

The door opened, and Keesey appeared, smiling and happy, as if nothing bad happened, ever. She had the attitude of a doctor about to give a child an injection.

“Hello, Mitchell. How do you feel?” She’d been watching for the moment he woke, he was sure.

“Numb,” he said flatly.

“The sedative’s still wearing off.”

“What difference does it make?”

He didn’t know what was worse—being treated like a sullen teenager or discovering that he was acting like one. He didn’t have any dignity left.

She continued. “I’d like to help you figure out what’s going on inside your head. The kind of things a cortical map can’t tell us.”

He turned his head toward the wall and shut his eyes, because tears threatened to fill them. He was trapped on so many levels he’d lost count. On the station, in the ward, within his own mind.

“Nobody will ever let me on a ship again. And I don’t know why. I just want to go back to the Drake.”

After a moment of thoughtful silence, she asked a question that sounded genuine and not like a scientist fishing for answers. “If you hadn’t become a navigator, what would you be?”

He’d joined Trade Guild and applied for shipboard duty because he loved space. He’d become an M-drive navigator because he could, he had the aptitude, and the Trade Guild had gladly taken him and assigned him to Mil Div. Being a navigator had seemed as close as a human being could ever get to the stars. The math was the language he used to understand space.