IGMS Issue 11 (8 page)

Melissa Kimberly was eight years old. Her hair was bleached a very light blonde from the Southern Florida sun and her face, appearing in high-resolution detail on her father's laptop, was a mask of confusion and fatigue. Contemplating this look of exhaustion, Trevor thought he knew its origin. She was tired from being lied to. In a world that was quite obviously falling apart, the best that Melissa (and most other eight-year-olds) could extract from their elders was thin reassurances and meaningless platitudes. She was too young to properly articulate her frustration, but if she were older, she might have explained that on a planet about to be ripped in half, there was very little purpose in sheltering people from the truth.

Trevor sensed her frustration as he told her how much he loved her and missed her. He asked her questions about life back at their house in Tallahassee. They talked about her friends at school and "Foo," the lop-eared bunny; mascot of the Kimberly family and Melissa's faithful companion. He could tell by her conversation -- distant and hollow -- that his daughter expected from him what she got from everybody else: a condescending evasion of reality.

"Daddy, are we gonna die?"

"Yes sweetheart."

"Everyone?"

"Yes."

"Even you?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure."

Rather than saddening her, she found the information somewhat thrilling, and even reassuring. Thrilling because she felt included as an equal in the cardinal event that was about to unfold, and reassuring because she now understood that she wouldn't have to suffer it alone.

"What happens after we die?"

"I don't know sweetheart. Nobody does. Some people think we'll all go to heaven. I don't know for sure, but I know that it'll be a great journey and me and your mom will be right there with you."

"I love you Dad."

"I love you too."

"Mom wants to talk now."

"Goodbye, love."

"Bye."

His wife's hair had been cropped short. He found this startling and then found it startling that -- under the circumstances -- he would find this startling. "You cut your hair!" he said, then, some moments later; "It looks good!"

Her face was deadpan. "Yes . . ." she said, "I cut my hair. Did you just tell Melissa that she was going to die?"

"She is going to die, Peggy. We all are."

"She's eight years old!"

"What difference does it make?"

"I can't believe you told her that."

"Peggy, she's one of us now. She's not a kid anymore, she's just one more human staring at the sky."

Peggy looked off-screen and Trevor knew she was examining her daughter. When she returned her gaze to the camera, her face had softened. "Maybe you're right," she said. "Anyway, now's not really a good time for a fight. Trevor, can you come down? I mean, is there any way?"

"No, Peggy, I'm sorry."

"But don't they have a Soyuz up there you could come down on?"

"Yeah, but they want me to go to Mars."

She put her hand involuntarily over her mouth. "Are you really going to go through with that?"

"For the good of all mankind."

"I thought Edward was putting me on. Do you think you can make it?"

"No."

"What? No? Damn it, Trevor, stop being so practical! We already know you're tough. Can't you just lie to me -- to us -- for a few days?"

"I'm not being practical. And believe me, I don't feel that tough. I just want you and Melissa to know that I'm going to the same place you are."

"Baby, I don't think we want you to come with us this time."

"Peggy, you don't know how badly it hurts being away from you and Melissa right now. I swear to God this wouldn't be so bad if I could just be with you. If the three of us could sit together on a hillside somewhere and watch the sky turn black, I really don't think I'd mind. If this is what the universe has planned, who am I to argue? But being up here, away from my family . . . it's a lot to take. It helps me to think we'll all be together after it's over."

"Okay, Trevor, I'll let you think that. But only if you let me think that you might just make it. That's what helps me."

"Fair enough."

"I love you, Trevor. I don't think I've ever loved you more than I do right now." She began to cry.

"I love you too, Peg. I miss you."

The two of them stared into their respective monitors, thousands of miles away from each other and looked into each other's eyes for the last time.

The best vantage point on Space Station Alpha from which to view ISBH-147 was the windowed cupola that connected the Destiny module to the control module. Gretchen and Nikolai huddled in it together. The black hole was not a terribly impressive sight. It wasn't really a sight at all. It was observable only by noticing that the star Adhara was missing from the constellation Canis Major, leaving Orion's faithful companion without a conspicuous point of his hindquarters.

"Maybe a galaxy exploded," said Nikolai.

Gretchen's mouth twisted into a pout, a mannerism she used when thinking deeply. She'd figured these black holes were some sort of debris thrown from the mother black hole that anchored the middle of Earth's own galaxy, the Milky Way. However, she couldn't explain why the objects were traveling in the wrong direction. The unthinkably dense mass at the center of the Milky Way rotated along with everything else and if it emitted a jet of black holes she would expect them to sneak up behind the planets they destroyed, rather than hitting them in the face. Nikolai's suggestion made sense. If an entire galaxy of rotating matter compressed itself into a hyper-massive sphere of energy, then blasted itself into particles, the black holes that had showered through Earth's solar system might be nothing more than minute shrapnel from an explosion that took place billions of years before the Earth had even formed. If these objects entered the wrong side of the Milky Way and were captured by its gravity, they would be the interstellar equivalent of a fleet of trucks headed the wrong way down a freeway.

"Does it matter?" asked Gretchen.

Nikolai shook his head slowly. "Did you talk to your husband?"

"Yeah," she answered. "It was weird. It was kind of awful actually. He just kept apologizing because he couldn't have kids. As if it mattered anymore. I was trying to tell him how much I missed him, but he was so pre-occupied that I don't feel like I really got the chance. What about you, did you speak with Ada?"

"Yes," Nikolai said and made a dismissive gesture, not because the conversation had been unimportant to him (his expression proved otherwise) but because in the face of so much personal tragedy, the Russian felt shy in discussing his own. Gretchen thought perhaps he wanted to avoid crying. She remembered the press event in Cape Canaveral where she'd met Ada and had been impressed by the casual way that she and her husband loved each other. They made it seem so easy and natural -- a simple question of feeling. As she saw the pain inside of Nikolai, it seemed to reflect back into her, and the feelings she had for her own husband became much sharper. Nikolai looked away and she was overtaken by a wave of sorrow that was much more intense than she'd felt when actually speaking with her husband. Water began to form at the corners of her eyes.

Trevor moved up behind them and looked over their shoulders. He said nothing.

Nikolai looked as if he were going to say something, then stopped.

"What?" asked Trevor.

"Nothing, it's just, well, there is one thing I've been thinking about." Gretchen looked over at Nikolai as she wiped at the tears in her eyes. "If we are all agreed that the shuttle mission offers no chance of survival . . . we are all agreed, right?" Gretchen and Trevor nodded. "Then, there is one other approach we could take to spread our seed -- so to speak -- across the galaxy. We wouldn't survive, but if we sent our DNA across the galaxy then maybe, somehow, remnants of humanity and of the planet Earth could begin anew somewhere else."

"You mean just jet ourselves off into the void?" asked Trevor.

"Exactly."

"What good would that do? We'd be dead."

"Yes, but some people think that the seeds of life on Earth were of similarly extraterrestrial origin; primitive microbiology that hitchhiked on asteroids and comets. We might not live to have human children, but who knows what information is encoded into our DNA and the DNA of the plants we'll bring with us. Perhaps the genetic material that makes up our bodies could someday, another trillion years from now, grow itself a new Earth."

Trevor thought for a moment, then said: "I have to admit, I think I've gotten used to the idea of crashing into Mars. Starving to death on the shuttle doesn't sound quite as appealing."

"I don't think we'll live long enough to starve to death."

"Sure we will, with the little bit of fuel in the shuttle, we'll be long dead before we leave the solar system."

Nikolai paused, then said,"I was thinking we could travel in a different way. Much faster."

"How?"

"Use the black hole."

Gretchen spoke up. "Anything that goes into a black hole is going to be destroyed. Whether or not something like 'wormholes' really exists is irrelevant. We'd be annihilated at the sub-atomic level before we found out."

"I couldn't agree more. I've always thought the idea of trying to travel the universe by entering a black hole was a bit like jumping off the Sears Tower and hoping to wind up in Seattle."

"Then what are you saying?" asked Trevor.

"We don't travel into it, we just let its gravity fling us across the galaxy." Nikolai leaned closer to Trevor and Gretchen. "If we boost the station's orbit just the right distance from the black hole's trajectory, we can reach a point where the gravity will pull on us enough to accelerate us tremendously, but not quite enough to catch up to the black hole which is traveling at close to the speed of light. NASA uses the gravity of other planets to slingshot their probes; the physics isn't really much different. I've done some quick math and I think we can achieve speeds of well over fifty percent of light speed."

"Oh," said Trevor. "So, we'd be killed instantly. I guess ultimately it's no different than hitting Mars at a thousand miles an hour. Maybe a bit quicker."

Nikolai nodded. "Probably."

Gretchen looked up in surprise. "Probably? Nikolai, we'd be accelerating to over 100,000 miles per second almost instantaneously. I think it's safe to say we wouldn't make it."

"Do you remember the vomit comet?" His two companions nodded that emphatically yes, they remembered the vomit comet. This KC135A jet obtained its name because it flew in a downward, parabolic trajectory that accelerated at the same speed as a falling object. This created a sense of weightlessness so that the astronaut trainees could feel what it was like to be in space. "How did you feel?" asked Nikolai.

Gretchen shrugged. "Sick?"

"Yeah," agreed Trevor, "we were calling you 'Retchin' for awhile."

Nikolai ignored the remark. "What else?"

"Weightless."

"Exactly." When the airplane was moving downward at the same acceleration as gravity, we felt no force of acceleration on our bodies, even though we were accelerating at 9.9 meters per second, per second. Haven't you ever wondered about that? The reason we felt no acceleration is that even though we were accelerating in space, in space-time, we were not. Our energy was being conserved."

"So," began Trevor, "if we accelerated from an effect of gravity -- from the black hole -- we wouldn't feel any acceleration?"

"No, I don't think we would. Don't misunderstand me, the gravitational forces will be extreme and there's a high likelihood that the ship will be ripped to pieces, but I suppose it's all academic anyway. We won't live through the adventure one way or another. It would just be nice to see some of the galaxy before we got pulverized."

"Well," said Gretchen, "I can't say I'm convinced, but I don't really see how it hurts anything. Why don't we split up into two groups. Those who want to can take the shuttle to Mars, the rest of us will stay on the station to do the . . . 'catapult thing.'"

Nikolai nodded his assent. "That okay with you Trevor?"

Trevor nodded. "I'll fly the shuttle if Hector doesn't want to, otherwise I'd like to stay with Gretchen. Plus, as ridiculous as the shuttle mission is, I think we need to give it the best chance of success possible. We don't have much food and water, so we're doing them a favor by staying behind. If more than three or four people go, they won't live long enough to crash."

Gretchen gripped his hand. "I'd like to try the catapult thing, but only to prove to Nikolai that his theory is bullshit. I'll bet you five dollars we get squashed to pancakes."

"Alright, you're on."