the flaps all together, in their haste to discover the source of the problem.
What was so eerie for me was that no one spoke; all I saw were wrinkled brows and darting eyes. I asked Reba what was wrong; she only shook her head as she propelled herself into the control area. After a few seconds, as I watched Neil and his navigator Jimmie (he was a double-duty crewman) frantically—albeit silently—trying to regain manual control of the engines, I noticed something so obvious apparently no one had seen it, something very wrong—the engine console was dark. Then, the first sound I’d heard since the ship lost gravity:
“I think...we came too close to something.” That was Neil, his voice tight and strained. Immediately, Jimmie countered from behind his controls, “No way...structure probably gave way enough for the engines to disconnect, ’sides, the alarms didn’t go off—”
“I believe Neil may be right....” Elizabeth’s voice trailed off ominously, her brogue a lilting whisper of doom as she keyed up the rear viewer. “Alarm or no alarms, there’s the evidence.” We floated toward her, hair and arms waving gently in the non-gravity, as we took a look at what she’d keyed up: The strangely enveloping blackness of hyperspace was gone. And in its place, the normality of a sky filled with a thick dusting of stars—and the startling strangeness of a rapidly receding, dangerous pure black spot blotting out the stars to the rear.
“What is it, Elizabeth?” Reba whispered.
“Look in the viewer,” she replied, her lips brushing against the dark hair swimming slowly in front of her face, “The gravitational vectors....” I now realized what she was implying, but it was almost inconceivable, so slight was the possibility of coming so close to the gravitational field of a super-dense star. I spoke through lips almost glued shut with fear, “Our vectors must’ve grazed a black hole, knocking us into normal space-time.” All of us must’ve realized that the collision avoidance system didn’t have the range to avoid those freak fields—the simplest of classical mechanics made it so. The gravitational pull increased only as the mass of the star, but its strength fell off as the square of the distance. The result was a gravitational vector that shot up frighteningly fast. By the time the system had time to react, vectors had already collapsed our field.
My legs were shaking in mid-float. If only we’d passed a little closer to the black hole, if only we’d lost a little more velocity, it would’ve already swallowed us, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
“It’s impossible,” Huoy frowned, “The chances of passing something like that in all this emptiness....”
“You fool!” Elizabeth hissed, “Look at the screen, woman! Improbable doesn’t mean ‘impossible’—there it is.”
“Look, let’s check out what we can, all right?” I asked, hoping to avoid one of those eye-bulging, throat-straining esper fights; apparently, the others were anxious to avoid one too, for we broke into teams, and began looking for every possible reason for the engines to have failed, starting with the in-ship circuits, and finally finishing with my offer to suit up and help Jimmie check the engines from outside the ship.
But what we found out there made me immediately regret my efforts to prevent Huoy and Elizabeth from engaging in another esper-argument...and for once, I didn’t mind being the odd-man out when Jimmie opted not to say anything as we neared the ship’s engine...and saw that the field antennae, the gravitation generators, conversion units and the radioactive ports were gone. Sliced clean off the ship, as if God himself had just reached out and snatched them off, leaving a void in the ship’s warp drive nacelles.
The only sound I could hear over the two-way radio connecting Jimmie and myself was his sob-like breathing, each breath coming in a painful hitch, only to be expelled in a mournful rush of air....
And because Jimmie’s esper abilities linked him with his fellow crewmen, he felt no need to speak to me, either...as it was, I had to humble myself and ask Neil what he thought might have happened once Jimmie and I re-entered the ship...not that I hadn’t had the time to consider the options myself. But actually hearing them from Neil’s lips did give me some small measure of cold comfort:
“I think in-homogeneities in the collapsing graviton field took our engines, or most of ’em, I guess. The theory predicted it could happen, but it’s never been done, as far as I know. But then, I suppose the test engineers didn’t have enough black holes nearby to test those particular conditions, did they?” I appreciated his slight attempt at humor, even if some of the others frowned. He went on, “In normal gravitational gradients, fields have always dropped evenly when the power was cut...but as far as we’re concerned, at least we have considerable normal velocity left in the sub-light engines from the hole encounter. Jimmie—” he turned to look over at the still-shaken navigator, “Is there any way to determine where we are?”
Biting his lower lip, until the pinkish flesh turned almost red, Jimmie shook his head, before answering, “No way, Neil...can’t even raise a signal on the network. Could be anywhere or anywhen...with no way to find out for sure. Nothing looks familiar on the star-charts and considering that we’ve lost most of the engines, there’s no way we can try getting our bearings by changing course...might as well let ’er stay on this course, see what we drift into—”
The navigator said more, to both Neil and the others, but it was a silent conversation...and even Reba was too distracted to fill me in on things.
And even after tasks were delegated, distress signals sent out, stock taken of our remaining rations, and the like, Reba still found herself unable to share the mutual horror she and her fellow espers had experienced after the accident—thus leaving me to wallow in my own unexpressed fear.
Day 136:
Been a long time, where have I been? Can’t think straight, like gun-cotton stuffed in my head ready to explode if I think. What am I supposed to be doing here? Writing, yeah, I’m doing that. But writing what?
All I can remember now are the last days—how many? It hurts to think. Wandering in the rain, yeah, looking for shelter. Many images, feelings, just emotions. Scared I wouldn’t find a safe place to rest. Wandering along looking for something, anything alive. I found and I lost the ’lopes, or they lost me. I don’t know if they like me....
I remember finding a ’loper nest, empty, but the signs of habitation were unmistakable...as was their scent. During the lucid (or what passed for lucid) times, when I wasn’t smelling phantom odors which originated in my brain, I realized that the ’lopes, especially the females—had a piquant, musky odor not unlike the husk fruits on which they constantly dined.
I’d previously dismissed the slight rises in the ground, tiny hillocks, as simply part of the environment, until I was walking past one and simultaneously saw and smelled something. There was a hole leading into the hillock, shored up with stones placed so artfully, in so ostensibly a careless pattern, that a casual glance might not reveal anything but a tumbling of stones near a dark spot on a hillock. But I saw how light shone partway into the hole, revealing depth. And the smell of the female ’lopes was strong, almost cloying in its richness. No wonder I never found a sleeping ’lope. They never slept above ground.
Curious, not wanting to simply barge in should there be some trap set—the ’lopes had reason to fear me, since some of my kind stole their dead—I climbed the hillock, searching for an air-hole. That, too, was artfully constructed as to appear unconstructed. Just an irregular hole in the Earth, shadowed by a tuber tree and artless tumbles of loose pebbles. But it was a deliberate hole, nonetheless. I stretched prone, my ear to the hole. No sound. I looked in, but there was no light visible...not until the sun set a little more, sending a narrow beam into the hole at the base of
