Dreams of the Stars

And then Jameson heard the unmistakable sound of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer wafting from out in the hall. The familiar, friendly sounds of the ship, life as usual. As the last vestiges of the nightmare—how else could he term it?—drained from him, he took solace in the sound of the upbeat, comfortingly old-fashioned song, with its cheerful tempo and mathematical simplicity—a mathematical simplicity that had suddenly departed his comfortable worldview. In a few terrifying moments, the precise and predictable universe he had always believed in had come tumbling down.

“Is something wrong?” Samuels asked.

“Well, either I’m insane or something entirely bizarre just happened.” I’m not insane, he thought. “Unless you’re aware of any giant rats on board.”

For a moment, Samuels looked as though he were about to laugh. But he stopped himself. “So I’m not the only one seeing strange things.”

Jameson looked at the floor, shaking his head. He scratched at his balding scalp, grimacing and exhaling something between a sigh and a moan. “We can’t ignore it. It’s outside our sphere of understanding, so we want to ignore it, put it down to imagination, but it’s not—I know imagination when I see it, and this was not imagination.”

“What was it?” Samuels looked grave.

“Nothing, never mind.” Jameson brushed past him. “I need to talk to Commander Boddy.”

Boddy felt he needed to talk to Samuels. The very personable and “irrational” qualities that Jameson found so perplexing in Samuels were precisely what Boddy liked about him. Boddy fondly remembered the first time he’d met Samuels. It had been a hot, humid day in Houston, and everyone had been scurrying to batten the place down because a monster hurricane was bearing down on them. (It ended up veering away at the last minute, as always seemed to happen when Cat-5 hurricanes scared the bejesus out of a population.) Boddy, of course, had been deep in simulation training—no mere hurricane pulls an astronaut away from his training—and after crashing a mock lunar bus for the fifteenth time, was on his way out for a one-hour break.

That was when he’d spotted a ridiculous-looking, tiny, brilliantly yellow hovering box speeding down the SpaceX runway at a blurring speed. It was a maglev car, of course, one of those specially rigged, profoundly dangerous and irresponsible models that didn’t run on a track. This one couldn’t be any larger than a writing desk; it was hard to imagine you could squeeze a driver and an engine into it.

Someone must have reported unauthorized activity on the runway, because a security car headed out there. Darting like a UFO, the tiny car swerved off the runway and zoomed up the LBJ Parkway, then snapped to an abrupt stop in front of Boddy. The roof opened up and a surprisingly soft-looking, bearded head popped out of the top and asked, “Hi, you Boddy?”

Boddy could only nod.

“Dennis Samuels. They told me to see you about lunar bus training.”

“They did?” Dennis Samuels—of course, the astrophysicist who was going to the Farside Observatory. No one had mentioned to Boddy that he would be working with a rookie, but that was the way NASA was these days—not as ordered as the old days, not as much emphasis on particular missions or assigned crews. Trips to the Moon were as routine as airline flights—trips to the space stations like a drive to the grocery store.

Samuels turned out to be not nearly as brash or as reckless as his dramatic appearance made him look. He had exquisitely timed his arrival with Boddy’s break—how he had known Boddy’s schedule for that day was something he had never divulged—and had screamed down the runway in order to get his rookie hazing out of the way. Anyone who pulled a stunt like that was automatically one of the boys.

From that time on, Boddy and Samuels were the best of friends. While Samuels was on Farside, they kept in touch, and indeed when Boddy piloted a repair shuttle around the Moon to do some maintenance on the communications satellites, Samuels had snuck into the base’s mass driver and shot a football on a trajectory to buzz the front of Boddy’s shuttle.

In fact, when Owen James was named prime commander of the Eldorado, Samuels had already been named as assistant scientist. Samuels had pressed James to suggest Boddy as backup commander. Boddy had never been sure of exactly what had transpired that convinced the Deke to agree (the chief of the astronaut office was traditionally called the “Deke,” a tradition dating back to the first legendary astronaut who had held the title, Deke Slayton)—and the circumstances by which James had been removed from flight status had always struck Boddy as suspicious—a contention he had no doubt was shared by Joe Felter, whom he knew had been a good friend of James’—only one of the many sticking points between him and his pilot.

But whether Boddy’s suspicions were true or not, coupled with his friendship for Samuels was a deep-seated gratitude, for no doubt at least one obstacle on the road to this mission had been cleared by him.

There was a soft knock on the door. “Come in,” Boddy called.

Rubber rubbed against rubber with a squeak as Samuels pushed the airtight door open. “Hi...you rang?”

“Yeah, come on in.”

“If it’s about your curve ball, I’m afraid you’re beyond all hope.”

“You’ve only got one nose, don’t stick it where someone might chop it off.”

“Too late.” Samuels rubbed his nose, reminding Boddy that he had, in fact, had the tip of his nose chopped off when, during a drunken bet, he had pressed his face against the frozen inner shell of the particle accelerator in Maryland. Okay, his nose hadn’t been “chopped” off, but by the time he’d pulled it loose it was frozen solid and as brittle as a mud sculpture. Laughing hysterically, he had tapped on it to demonstrate how solid it was and it had fallen off into the grass. Thank God for prosthetic surgery.

“So what can I do for you?”

“Help me with a scientific matter, of course.”

“So why not send for Jameson?”

Boddy laughed. “Guess I should have.”

Samuels flopped into the chair behind Boddy’s desk, began presumptuously to click through Boddy’s files. “Yeah, I don’t blame you. Jameson’s in a mood today.”

“So what else is new?”

“No, I mean really.” Samuels’ voice had turned serious. “I swear to God, he was hallucinating. I mean, it’s not like him to joke, is it?”

“If Jameson’s developed a sense of humor, that’ll be the strangest thing that’s happened today, and that’s really saying something.”

“In that case, he really was in some altered state when I found him.”

Boddy leaned against the wall across from Samuels, arms crossed. “You said he was hallucinating?”

Samuels shrugged. “Well, you know how tight-lipped he is. He wouldn’t really tell me anything, just made some cryptic comment about a giant rat—but that wasn’t really the strangest thing about it.” He paused, brows furrowed. “I think...I can’t really say that I found him, per se.”

When Samuels said nothing more, Boddy prodded him. “Go on, what do you mean?”

Samuels shook his head, trying to remember, trying to explain. “It’s more like, we were talking, and I was asking him if he was all right—it’s as if that was the beginning of...of the...scene.”

“The ‘scene’?”

Samuels nodded. “I’m not sure I can say where I was or what I was doing before I was standing there in the recreation circle talking to Jameson. Almost like I was...an extra in a...in a movie about Jameson. As if I had a walk-on part and I didn’t exist until he was aware of me.”

Had Felter or Garr made such a comment, Boddy would have snapped at them—as, indeed, he seemed to remember doing this morning. But he took his good friend Samuels much more seriously. They had survived together in the jungles of South America during training, they had even been shipwrecked on an upside-down fishing boat for two weeks. They knew each other and trusted each other to talk about things they might not mention to others. “So then tell me about your morning. What did you do when you got up this morning? What did you do in the hours before you were talking to Jameson?”

Samuels puffed a heavy exhale. “I got up at 7:30...washed, did the morning reports...went to the science lab, recalibrated the telescopes, did an inertial fix...went to the control room, helped Reichmann stabilize the rotation...and I think that’s kind of the last thing I remember. I remember talking to Jameson after that.”

“How do you account for it? Is it relativity?”

“Man, I’m a physicist. I can tell you all about the spacetime effects of what we’re doing, but if you’re asking if this weird stuff is connected to it, it sounds like you need a neurologist. Or a neurologist-physicist. Or a specialist in some branch of science that doesn’t exist yet.”

“Is it possible that our...consciousness is objecting to the time dilation effect? That our consciousness wants to move at the speed of ordinary time and is being confused by the time dilation?”

Samuels was already shaking his head. “No, no, no, time dilation is fundamentally a matter of observation. Time itself is. People think of time as something tangible, like a river, as though it’s something real that flows past us, or that we move past, but it’s really not. It’s simply a measurement of change relative to our awareness—just like the change you perceive in the spatial dimensions, sort of, as you move past something. Only in this case the change is temporal rather than spatial—unless you’re talking about a change in an object’s location, in which case you measure that by both spatial and temporal coordinates—“

“Samuels, stop blathering and give me an answer.”

Samuels smiled nervously. “Sorry. Just thinking out loud. Ummm...point is, the time dilation effect is a matter of our perception of the changes that take place in our universe. If our ‘consciousness,’ as you call it, were resisting the effect, the effect wouldn’t exist at all. We’re just seeing what’s there. Or, really, we aren’t, since we don’t really see any changes except the ones taking place aboard ship. Our only awareness of the passage of time is in the ship’s clocks. Of course, we have clocks keeping track of both Earth time and ship time, but I’m sure you’ve noticed our circadian rhythm matches ship time seamlessly, not Earth time. Otherwise we’d be sleeping and waking at a rate of—let’s see—about once every sixteen minutes! So no, our brains are having no problem with time dilation.”

“So then speculate. What is going on? Are we imagining things? Are we going crazy? Are we entering a parallel universe or something?”

“The parallel universe idea might not be so crazy, if you think of time as a hidden universe that’s offset ninety degrees from the three dimensions of space. But even if you do look at it that way, I don’t see why it would be causing us to have the...experiences we’ve been having.” Samuels rubbed his beard. “We’ve got the same kinetic energy as the ship...which is a damn lot by now...so by E=mc2 we might actually be seeing some effects we didn’t think of—our bodies might even be throwing off tiny gravitational waves. Or ...”

Boddy leaned over the desk. Samuels was frowning, lost in thought, and Boddy didn’t want to interrupt his train of thought.

This conversation, Boddy realized, would be easier if he were actually talking to Samuels rather than a statue of Samuels. It had been foolish to bring a statue of Samuels along anyway, since the real Samuels was here on the ship. He would have to move the statue away from his desk in order to work, but meanwhile he’d have to talk to the real Samuels later.

Lester Garr was angry. With his IQ, his expertise, his experience, and his commanding personality, he resented being yelled at like a child by a man half his size, with half his intellect and scarcely a third of his experience. Boddy was a fine pilot, the best, but his hands-on experience with engineering matters was quite another story. And what was a spaceship? A piece of engineering! Who kept the ship running while Boddy sat in his swivel chair trying to look imposing? Garr did! Boddy wanted that circulator fixed—well, why didn’t Boddy fix it himself, then? Because he couldn’t!

Suddenly Garr had the image of Boddy working down here in engineering, and the image brought a smile to his lips. He couldn’t imagine Boddy would be able to stand getting grease on his oh so well manicured little fingers.

Lawrence Acker pulled himself out from under an electrical panel, wiped his hands on his overalls, and noticed Garr approaching. “Oh. Garr.”

Garr stifled his instantaneous reaction to the abrasive Acker. With all the compatibility tests run before the mission, by what unfathomable bureaucratic shuffling of papers he and Lawrence Acker had been paired as co-workers baffled him; it was in more than in jest that he sometimes wondered if the engineering corps assigned Acker to the Eldorado just to get rid of him. Fortunately, fussy and insecure though he was, Acker was a competent engineer, and so long as conversation did not trespass into the territory of the personal, Garr found that he could work with his short, pudgy, prematurely gray assistant.

“I don’t see anything wrong with that circulating pump,” Acker said in that drawn-out, contemptuous tone which, by its contempt, sought companionship from a similarly contemptuous colleague.

Yet, though the focus of Garr’s contempt was his commander, he had held his tongue while talking to Boddy and his irritation now sought an outlet. “It’s not your job to see what’s wrong, that’s my job.” That was, of course, not at all true; indeed, before reporting to the command center, Garr had specifically asked Acker to troubleshoot the circulator. But he’d be lasered before he would apologize to Acker. And as Acker did not see fit to protest—such a complaint would risk his superior’s dread disapproval—Garr simply said in the same disdainful tone, “Now, let’s get to work on it.” He couldn’t help adding a sarcastic, “Boddy’s orders.”

Acker, chagrined, followed him in silence.

Garr felt the silence tinged with tension—not the tension of anger, for the only anger was his own with Boddy, but with the fear that at any moment Acker would speak. Acker was useful for his hands and his expertise. His mouth was quite an extraneous piece of equipment. Virtually everything Acker said which was not strictly related to the job revolved around a single subject: himself. Therefore, unless the two engineers were involved in some engineering task, Garr detested conversation with Acker; for when it wasn’t a never-ending lament on how hard his life had been up to this point, it was (even worse) a high-pitched, whining criticism of the way Garr treated him. Some of Acker’s choice phrases were “I don’t feel like you respect me,” “I don’t feel like you’re listening to me,” “I don’t feel like my feelings are being acknowledged,” and “Are you mad at me?”—most of which were accurate, if inconsequential, assessments—and most maddening, specific questions as to the reason for Garr’s own feelings, which were, more often than not, a surprise to him. For instance, “You’ve been awfully quiet ever since I told you I don’t like Liberace,”—implication, that Garr was angry with Acker for disliking Liberace, when in fact Garr was actually thinking about semipermeable membranes in the ship’s atmospheric scrubbers and couldn’t give a shit about Acker’s thoughts on Liberace.

How does one work with such a man?

As they walked, Garr with a deliberate and steady gait, Acker with a more pronounced bounce in the Mars gravity, from the closed confines of the environment service compartment and into the engine room proper, Acker’s dreaded Mouth opened, and Garr winced.

“This ship is more like a high school than a spaceship,” Acker said nonsensically.

Garr scrunched his face, but did not turn around for Acker to see his bafflement at such a bizarre observation, nor did he reply and thus risk continuation of an already ill-conceived conversation.

“Down here on the ground floor,” Acker blathered on, still in that tone of contempt that he hoped invited companionable commiseration, “working around with wood shop equipment.”

What in the hell is he talking about? Garr thought irrelevantly. So seldom did Acker make any sense that Garr gave little thought to this latest lunacy; yet a corner of him wondered if Acker was seeing something which he was not. The engine room did not, to Garr, resemble anything that might be found in a high school, and its high-tech equipment had nothing whatsoever to do with wood shop. If any aspect of the Eldorado resembled a high school, it was its crew.

But he had a flash, just a moment, out of the corner of his eye, when his awareness caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a wood lathe, and the swivel and the bed beneath, as well as the floor, seemed bathed with blood. The image was so unexpected, so horrifying, and yet so instantaneous, that he started. He looked in the direction of the apparition, but all he saw was the same shielded isotope that powered the minus-Y section’s power that had always been there. An apparition—a distortion of an everyday object caught in peripheral vision in unusual light, or from an unusual angle, or at just the right moment to trigger a temporary misapprehension of the truth.

Yet had he known a little about Acker’s own horrific memories of high school wood shop, he might be less quick to his explanation.

Covering his momentary terror, he growled, “Quit being a smart-ass, Acker.”

If anyone embodied the old adage of “our Germans are better than their Germans,” it would be Hans Reichmann. It would be exaggerating to say that he had designed the Eldorado, or even its “Ziploc” drive system, but his guiding hand had certainly led to the final design. Reaching for the stars had been his lifelong dream. If the Eldorado was the modern equivalent of the old Apollo Moon program, then Reichmann was its Von Braun—without the checkered past. And the tremendous burden—a burden he still could scarcely think of without a fluttering of the heart, a tightening of the stomach—of convincing the people of the United States and Congress to fund a mission that would never return had been almost squarely on his shoulders.

He had learned the hard way that knowledge for the sake of knowledge, adventure for the sake of adventure, and the opening of a new frontier were not sufficient incentives for the American public or its government. It was a strange paradox for a nation founded by pioneers, which had put the first humans on the Moon.

In the long run, with inestimable help from Horace Rockwood III, his biggest investor and, significantly, Intervision magnate, he had swayed the public with an economic argument, that investment in the development of the Zero-Point Lorentz Control (ZPLC) drive, and the construction of a starship propelled by it, would drive the nation out of its recession, put hundreds of thousands to work in high-paying jobs, and reward the national infrastructure with unheard-of new technologies.

That this was news to the American public puzzled Reichmann, since the nation had enjoyed precisely the same benefits from the old Apollo program. It made more sense when he learned the surprising fact that NASA was not allowed (being a government organization) to promote itself.

Still, the lack of interest in the sheer spirit of adventure stunned him even still. What a fierce contrast between the cynical, what’s-in-it-for-me general public and the driven, passionate, curious, daring and selfless men he now worked with aboard ship. There seemed to be two Americas—though how precisely to classify them eluded him. One thing he was sure of: the hoary old war between “liberals” and “conservatives” was not the true division; those were mere names attached to flimsy and ill-defined agendas whose main purpose seemed to him more a rallying cry than any true belief in a goal or an ideal.

For although NASA’s manned space projects were theoretically international—including the Russian, European, and Indian space agencies, as well as private contractors in various countries—the bulk of it was paid for by the American taxpayer, a fact which irritated many Americans who resented paying for flights on commercial spaceships that their tax money had already paid for.

By comparison, the Eldorado had ended up looking like a pretty sweet deal for John Q. Public. Jobs, money, technology. Even as the huge bulk of the great ship had taken shape in high Earth orbit, the excitement of the coming journey failed to galvanize most people; the spectacular footage of the construction operations was boring, the astronauts, as always, dehumanized by their space suits and technical talk, and the unimaginable beauty of the scene diluted even in crisp high-definition 3D.

A friend of Reichmann’s had tried to spice things up by digitally adding certain color variations that were invisible in the raw footage, plus the dazzling myriad of stars that were never visible to a camera, but his efforts had only been repaid by resentment from space enthusiasts who didn’t want to see the footage tampered with, and by conspiracy theorists who interpreted the tampering either as an attempt to cover up films of alien spaceships, or as evidence of deliberate fakery of a project that “everyone” knew did not exist, since the Eldorado was a hoax.

Yet the persistent dream of the voyage to the stars defused Reichmann’s exasperation, and his supervision of the design and construction of the Eldorado and its revolutionary engine occupied him to the exclusion of all else; especially and most willfully the apathy and blindness of the masses. Only his public appearances, designed to galvanize the public, distracted him and exposed him to the general fickleness of the populace. Even his Intervision appearances exposed him to the bizarre points of view and uninformed theories out there, since he couldn’t resist reading the user comments which flowed in whenever he spoke.

But now, after ten years of meetings, discussions, designs, decisions, construction of construction equipment to construct the vehicles which would construct the space platform where the Eldorado would be constructed, supervising the ground-based and space-based sites, and of course training incessantly, and in the process getting to know the crew, now, at last, here he was, here they were, on that voyage to the stars which had so consumed him for so long.

He frequently sat in his quarters, or in the lounge, just looking at the walls, at the shape of the room, filled with a giddiness, an excitement, sheer delight at just being here. What a sensuous pleasure he derived just from the knowledge that here he was, inside this grand ship, hurtling through the cosmos at relativistic velocity. Everything worked perfectly. The crew was the best that could be hoped for. None of the equipment had broken down; even that pesky glitch in the circulator was no more than a temporary inconvenience.

That was not to say he was unaware of the oddness that so perplexed Boddy and the others. He had himself noticed a strange feel to the air, something off with his eyesight, as though he were unable to focus on anything for too long.

He had been working in the control room with Samuels all morning, yet now he wondered at the work they had done. Somehow the console seemed wrong...Oh, yes, it was the old console he had worked at in Washington for six years prior to departure. How strange...no, that console was on Earth. The console aboard the Eldorado was a flatscreen which displayed spacetime calculations and graphics, drive parameters, and trajectory details. He was tempted to go back to the control room just to make sure, but stopped himself. There was no need. It must be his memory tricking him. It certainly made no sense that a design and communications console back in Washington would mysteriously have been aboard ship this morning.

Ah, his rambling thoughts. He must not have slept well last night. Obviously he was misremembering this morning’s work. Perhaps an afternoon nap would straighten his mind out. He strolled down the curving corridor, past the crew’s personal lockers, upon which were posted each man’s drawing of a scarecrow. Some of the scarecrows had pipes in their mouths, some had straw hats, some had smiley faces, others were more lifeless. He resented their happiness, what with the poor report card he had received from Boddy.

He was glum, depressed, and the way the scarecrows ran about, playing and laughing, mocked him. He saw by Rudolph’s silly smile and posture, pipe in mouth, that he wanted Reichmann to join in, to stand with the rest of the scarecrows and act silly. Reichmann didn’t feel like it. He brushed Rudolph off. “I need to put the bucket in the attic.”

Behind him, Gustav, Edric, and Klytus laughed at him, laughed as they always did, laughed because he wasn’t as smart as they were. Well, he’d show them. He’d show them all. Someday. Someday he would get good grades. It was Boddy’s fault, not his. Boddy was a lousy teacher and his tests made no sense.

Then he remembered that the scarecrows were not real people, but merely paper cutouts lined along the side of the classroom. Odd that they were now his old friends, running about and impersonating scarecrows.

Boddy had actually commended his performance. What a relief. What a moment of fright it had been, to once again feel himself a failure. Would that it had all been a dream...but it had not been. Those scarecrows really had been there.

Reichmann squinted at the wall. The lockers were bare. They were the same blank, gray storage lockers that they were every day.

Boddy...Felter...Garr...Jameson...Samuels...Reichmann...Acker.

Seven. There are seven of us.

Boddy stared at the mission profile for a long time, unsure whether it would disappear in his hand or whether the number of names would shift around or—God willing—if he would wake up any moment and find that this had all been a dream and he was actually aboard a ship that made sense.

Joe Felter leaned over the desk and studied the mission profile with him. “Yeah, no doubt about it. There are seven of us.”