Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (78 page)

During the final two years, they radioed a massive amount of data to us, with the blocked-out information zones supplied. The new material made sense to the computer people, and they accomplished much in terms of transferring operations portions of the damaged “brain” to unused data banks. Again and again, they tried to restore broken or zapped consoles, rebuild and rewire and fire up the circuits, but their trial runs failed to solve our major problem. Despite all efforts, the reverse-thrust engines refused to lower beneath the body of the ship. There was an improvement of neural connections, a rebooting of some secondary functions, but not enough to make deceleration happen.

*

During the month before the approaching deceleration event, I fought a growing despondency. Many others struggled with the same thing. On the whole, this was a time when optimists were sifted from pessimists, but no one could know which of the two were realists.

I, employing my favorite conflict-resolution method, turned to drink. I should say
re
turned—vodka, the pain-killer of my youth, my old best friend. I spent a lot of time in the panorama room with a jug in my hand, watching our approaching solar system grow larger. If I had not gone off on a shooting spree seven years ago, if I had not indulged in my little tantrum, we would soon have begun our long, gentle approach to Earth’s orbit, right on schedule. Now I would spend the rest of my life in outer space, eating and drinking merrily, if I did not shoot myself.

The Commander had returned the gun to me. Presuming it was my mine, he had handed it over, without bullets, somewhere around year five of the homeward journey. Later, with the aid of some housebreaker skills, I located a box of bullets in Paul’s apartment, hidden under a copy of Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot
in his bedside table drawer.

Thus armed, I was prepared to meet any eventuality.

*

Now I come to the events that determined the end of it all.

Those of us who had tried to save the ship throughout these past years gathered together in the command center on KC deck to observe the moment when deceleration should rightly have begun. It would be a non-event, we were certain, yet we felt it necessary to be present. We would see that the ship continued to hurl itself placidly into infinity, without resistance, confirming what we already knew.

The moment came and went. Nothing changed on the screen above the command module. There were no shudders from ignition of counter-thrust, which was as it should be, since the reverse engines remained doggedly inside the ship. Now we knew that what we had anticipated would be enacted as fact. Our future lay out there among the stars.

And then the inconceivable happened. A man came running forward from the navigation department and cried out that the maneuver vents had begun firing. The ship was turning a fraction of a degree.

And it continued to turn, degree after degree.

People scrambled in all directions, consulting the intact instrument consoles and those that had been rebuilt, checking readings and shouting out what they were seeing on their screens.

The Commander strode back with the navigation man to his section. I followed them and stood behind them, listening.

“I don’t know why,” said a lieutenant commander, “but we’re turning on a tangential course.”

“But what’s making it happen?” asked the Commander.

“I have no idea why the maneuver vents are suddenly functional. But they
are
working. They’re turning the ship as if we have begun deceleration.”

“Will we penetrate the orbital plane according to return flight plan?”

“I’m not entirely certain yet, but if the course correction continues, we may be retracing the outbound flight plan made nineteen years ago.”

“What?”

The man looked down at his console. “It’s really too early to tell, but the readings are changing steadily, the ship adjusting our trajectory moment by moment.”

The man watched his screens for a time. We stood by him silently, unable to assess the meaning of the complex time / space data he was looking at.

Finally, he looked up with a frown. “Factoring our track of adjustment, the computer is extrapolating that we’ll be coming in
on
the orbital plane.

“But we’re not decelerating.”

“I know, sir. And that means we have a situation here. We’re bearing on course for intersection with Earth-orbit at too high a speed.”

“Could it be a stellar compass error?”

“All the instruments give the same readings.”

“When do we intersect with Earth-orbit?”

“It would have been five months from now, if we were decelerating steadily. If we maintain this velocity, and if the auto-navigation continues to correct for the differences between low-speed and highspeed trajectories, we have approximately seventy-two days,
Kosmos
time, before impact.”

“Impact?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You mean there’s a navigational lock on the planet?”

“It looks that way. We’ll know more as we observe the ship’s progress.”

“Change the course, Lieutenant Commander; put us out into space.” The man bent over his console and tapped command keys, checked his screen, read instruments, and looked up. “It’s not responding.”

“That can’t be”, said the Commander in a calm voice. “If the maneuvering system is working and if it can send data to you, we can send data to it.”

“It doesn’t seem to be receiving it, or maybe it’s ignoring it. It’s not responding to commands.”

“Then shield the navigation intake, or shut down the N system entirely.”

The lieutenant commander tried both and fixed his eyes on his screen.

“It’s not responding either, sir. It’s got to be an auto-function that’s blocking our commands.”

The Commander turned on his heel and went forward to his post. I followed close behind him. He clicked the ship’s communications network and spoke into it, calling all computer people to KC immediately.

The Commander then sent a message to Earth-base, informing them what was happening.

*

Continuous searches were made in Navigation’s innermost control center, deep in the ship’s energy section on PHM. But a manual control for the off / on function, if there was such a thing, was never found. In our present situation, the absence of such a mechanism seemed to be an insane omission on the part of the ship’s designers. Placing limitless confidence in the KC terminals, they had not foreseen this kind of crisis. Thus, our frustration steadily gave way to feelings of suppressed panic. Weeks passed, technicians came and went, slaved over terminals with shaking hands, but in the end, they threw up their arms in dismay, as perplexed as anyone else.

When the reply from Earth arrived, it was coded top secret. The communications people had decrypted the message and printed it out in plain English for the Commander’s eyes only. I was standing beside him when he read it quietly to himself. His face paled, and then he turned to me as if he did not see me. The paper had fallen from his hands. I picked it up and read it. He was instructed by Earth-base, on the authority of the World Federation, to destroy the ship. For a moment, the Commander stared at me, and then he seemed to recognize me. A wave of bitterness washed across his features, but he said nothing and abruptly turned away, heading toward the exit door. I caught up with him as he was entering the KC elevator. He ignored my presence, his face still white, his brow sweating.

We got out on PHM, and made our way swiftly to the propulsion department.

The Czech engineer was sitting in an easy chair beside the main reactor, chuckling to himself as he watched a comedy on his mobile
max
. The Commander tried to catch his attention courteously, but the engineer scowled and ignored him.

The auxiliary reactor was humming, and I could hear the faint whisper of the maneuver vents firing outside the hull, turning us slowly, slowly, toward our final destination.

The Commander picked up the
max
and shut it off. Then he described the situation to the man and instructed him to shut down all electric power in the ship.

“Do you mean flip the switch, boss?” the other asked with an ironic look.

“Shut
everything
off”, the Commander snapped. “We have to kill the navigation.”

“Turn it off upstairs, why don’t you?”

“The navigation commands aren’t working.”

“With my deepest apologies, boss, but there is no switch down here. I can turn off nothing.”

“What! This is the energy source for the ship!”

“Yes, but the designers cleverly protected it from us fallible human beings. No one is allowed to shut off
all
the power with one click. You see, we always need air, we need water, we need—”

“Then how do we do it?”

“You would have to spend two days unlocking the fail-safes for the ship’s energy system. This requires three engineers, each with his permission and unique code-key. I can show you the service portal, if you wish. But it won’t help you. There are back-up batteries too—somewhere else, not here—navigation will continue to run even if the reactor is shut down.”

The Commander fumed, his lips working angrily.

“Put the reactors into meltdown”, he barked. “The ship must be destroyed.”

The engineer looked at the Commander as if the latter were insane.

“What are you talking about?” he huffed.

“Blow this ship up!”

“A reactor meltdown does not cause a nuclear explosion”, said the engineer as if he was trying to explain the obvious to a tedious child. “It will produce steam, yes; lethal radioactive emission, yes; fire, yes; some damage, yes; but there will be no large explosion. Besides, this ship is stronger than the containment building of a power plant.”

“Then how do we demolish it?”

“You cannot . . . unless . . . unless . . .”

“Tell me, man, and make it quick!”

“We power up the deceleration tubes from the propulsion reactor—anti-matter-catalysed fusion. Reverse thrust, you see. The tubes fire
inside
the ship, and then we break into pieces. Simple, no?”

“Simple”, the Commander murmured. “Then do it—and do it now!”

The engineer put a little flask to his lips and took a long drink from it. He sighed and said, “I have no controls for it here. You must do it from KC.”

Back upstairs, we went at a run down the corridors into KC command and arrived at the deceleration console. I closed my eyes, preparing myself to be disintegrated. Command after command was entered, but nothing happened.

None of the anti-matter gurus had survived the blast on Nova. If Xue had been here and given enough time, he might have been able to rig the anti-matter propulsion units to backfire into the ship or, with luck, collapse our entire mass into a microscopic black hole. But he was not here.

Navigation people came forward and informed the Commander that the instrument readings continued to show that the ship was adjusting itself perfectly for intersection with Earth’s orbit, and if the present course continued we would impact with the planet within thirty-eight hours.

*

They tried everything possible to change us from a massive missile into a fine rain of debris. On the last morning of my life, when I realized that we could not stop what was about to happen, I returned to my room on deck B. There, I changed my clothing, dressing myself in my fine black suit, which I had last worn for Pia’s wedding. White shirt and bolo tie. My old snake knife snapped into its case at my waist. I shined my cowboy boots. As an afterthought, I shaved my face and combed the few remaining strands of my hair.

“It’s my party”, I snorted at the contorted face in the bathroom mirror.

As I was preparing to leave my quarters, I happened to glance at the poet-deer on the shelf. This in turn led to a bitter last look at Xue’s Bible and his slide rule. After filling the revolver chambers with bullets, I tucked the weapon into my belt. Then I went out and found the closest bistro. I took a jug of vodka from its stores and went forward to the panorama hall.

The room was empty. I was relieved because I wanted to be alone for this. I sat down on the padded bench, front row center, the best seat in the house. Now I would watch the greatest epic in the history of film.

The screen was 3D real time. We had just passed Pluto, with about seven hours to go until impact.

Speed gives you relativity. So does alcohol. During those inebriating hours, I laughed and laughed and sipped and sipped. What kind of laughter was this? I do not know. It was black and bitter in a way that I had never before experienced. Not merely the absence of internal light, a dying bird struggling blindly in a tar pit. No, it was something closer to the inversion of light into a deeper inversion of darkness—a psychological mobius loop that twisted upon itself in an infinite descent.

Spiraling ever downward, I looked inward to the fast-flashing film of my life, its unceasing honors, its secret failures. Its losses and helpless rage, its murderous ambitions in the name of justice, the spiral staircase, which I saw myself shattering with an axe. And mixed with these were the dreams I had had during the voyage—the images thrown up by my subconscious—the aged woman in a turquoise sari looking at me with love, the girl bringing me a golden bowl of food, offering it to me if I would accept, urging me to eat, calling me
pitaji
. Then more fractured images: Alvaro with a bullet shattering his skull, my mother with her belly cut open and my brother and sister pulled from her body like rats. My own beautiful children leaping into a lake of floating water lilies, then me leaping and laughing in the ocean waves with them at my side, and the boy playing the cello—my son, or myself as I might have been. I saw the love running through everything, oft-beleaguered love, and love now dying in the suction of absolute despair, the approaching conflagration of all love, the final extinction of love.

By now, Earth had realized we were its incoming nemesis. We flashed through a barrage of nuclear missiles, too fast for them to lock onto us. Then we penetrated mine fields, a needle at lightspeed, passing through a haystack without touching a straw. There were explosions in space behind us as we touched the mines’ sensors and in split seconds were beyond their range as they detonated.