Dreams of the Stars

Boddy resisted physically recoiling at Felter’s close proximity. He hated it when anyone read over his shoulder, but Felter, who could get on anyone’s nerves with his psychological scrutiny, pretentious mannerisms, and bad breath, particularly irritated him. But the situation at hand was more immediate than any dislike Boddy may have for his pilot. He sighed, focusing on the sheet of paper in front of him, and said, “Unless this profile changes on us too.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of that. It seems to me we’re conscious of the weird things that are happening,” Felter projected in his loud, lecturing tone. “I mean, we may not think much of these phenomena while they’re happening, but, y’know, it’s in our awareness that something’s different from the way it should be. So can you think of any members of the crew who aren’t on this profile?”

Boddy could find no derision in Felter’s question; for once he was simply working with Boddy on solving the problem. Felter fell uncharacteristically silent—usually the two of them were frantically racing to speak; or, more truthfully, Boddy spent his time racing to insert a word here and there as Felter prattled on in that self-important way of his. But in this rare thoughtful silence, Boddy was able to devote his thoughts to what they were talking about rather than the race to talk about it. He put the profile down, sat back in his chair, and thought carefully. Engineers...Garr and Acker. Scientists... Jameson and Samuels. Flight dynamics...Reichmann and Felter. And himself, commander. At the moment, nothing seemed wrong aside from the general sense of detachment. Tentatively, he felt he could assume that all was as it should be right now. “There are seven of us. But I would swear there were nine.”

“Not according to the mission profile. Look at it logically; solid objects are something we can trust. I can buy our minds being affected, but not solid reality.”

“But solid reality itself—“

“One time Owen and I went to a physics lecture at Hawking Hall and this guy talked about that very subject, the idea that solid reality might suddenly change, and he pointed out that, yes, it can happen, but mathematically, you’d have to wait longer than the lifespan of the universe for such a change to occur.”

“Yes, but solid reality—”

“Quantum changes are very common in the subatomic world,” Felter boomed, either unaware or uncaring that Boddy was well familiar with the principle. “The fact that electrons can share wave functions, and thus, in effect, be in two different places at once, defies common sense, because we don’t observe those things in the macroscopic world, but the definite rules by which we observe matter behave represent averages of divergent quantum states.”

As Felter paused for breath, Boddy leaped in. “But solid reality is unreliable at the quantum level and the relativistic level.”

“At the quantum level, yes, but we’re not dealing with the quantum level here. We’re dealing with time dilation. I find it very hard to believe any quantum effects such as indeterminacy could be affected by relativistic velocity or anything else our ship does.”

You find it hard to believe. Well, I guess that seals that, Boddy thought. “But the Ziploc Drive itself acts on the quantum level.”

“True,” Felter said, to Boddy’s immense delight, stumped.

But before Boddy could think of a suitable reply, he became distracted. Suddenly he couldn’t recall what they had been talking about. Tossing the profile aside, he grumbled, “It doesn’t matter.”

“’It doesn’t matter?’ I should say it matters a great deal. I don’t think a commander who doesn’t care about an unfolding crisis is prepared to deal with the unpredictable consequences. Personally, I think it does matter.”

Yes, it does, Boddy thought. But he could think of little to say in response to Felter’s reprimand—not that Felter would even hear him as he lectured on in the tone of a parent disciplining a child who’d brought home a bad report card. This conflict is not a healthy attitude for any spacecraft—let alone one that’s in trouble. And yes, he realized, the Eldorado was in trouble.

There was a knock at the door. The door was slightly ajar, so Boddy just called, “Come on in.”

Jameson swung the door open and stepped in. His uniform was gone. Uncharacteristically, the scientist was clad in a white tee shirt and oversized, torn blue jeans which sagged down almost to his crotch. His hair was unkempt, such of it as was visible from beneath his backwards baseball cap. “Commander Boddy,” he snarled.

“Jameson.” At first, Boddy scarcely noticed Jameson’s attire. “If you want to, you can have a seat.”

Now, as Jameson pulled up a chair, turned it around, and thunked down on it, leaning forward against its back, Boddy finally felt the astonishment he should have felt on first seeing him. “I want to tell you something.”

“I don’t like your tone,” Boddy said, but failed to inject any authority into his voice.

“Whether you like it or not, I am taking this tone with you. This is a mutiny.” From behind his back, Jameson pulled a welding torch. It was a small, portable design, as small as a revolver, and Boddy saw that its current setting was scale seven—high enough to blast a focused beam that could incinerate him in seconds, as well as potentially do considerable damage to the hull.

“Put that away,” Boddy said automatically.

“I’ll do no such thing. I want this vessel, and I will have it if I have to kill every last person aboard.”

Slowly, carefully, Boddy rose. Jameson, too, rose, the torch pointed at his chest. Felter, forgotten, was gone. Boddy put his hands up in surrender. “Easy, Jameson,” he said—then, distracting Jameson by waving his left hand, with his right he grabbed his chair and swiftly hurled it over the table into Jameson’s arm. The torch flew from his hand and clattered under the desk. There was no time for Boddy to reach it, so he fled the room.

He ran down the empty, curved hall, and presently he heard footsteps behind him, then Jameson’s voice, rapping:

“I was king of the hill in high school in math!

In college I was without peer in math!

I can whip you in any field in math!

Calculus, algebra, name your math!”

Jameson’s voice somehow reverberated through the hall so that it rang in Boddy’s ears, filling him with a primal terror, both from the presence of the welding torch and from the terrifying impact of Jameson’s words—for Boddy had, in fact, struggled in math.

“My triangles can Pythagoras fight!

His angles are acute, mine are right!

Avogadro puts numbers to mole!

But my zero-point constant plays more of a role!”

The elevator was ahead. Boddy thought for a moment—perhaps if he leapt into the elevator and randomly pushed buttons, Jameson would have no way to know which level he was on.

“I always got straight As in math!

But you, you fool, never could master math!

I win over you ’cause I’ve no fear of math!

But you never will conquer your demons in math!”

Boddy pushed the call button, but knew it would take time for the elevator car to arrive. The stairwell was nearby. He ran as the torch sizzled a blotchy black hole in the metal of the elevator door. Boddy ran, not looking back, and pushed through the heavy doors into the stairwell. Grabbing the side rails with both hands, he flew down the winding stairs, leaping from one balcony to the next, while behind him, the whole way, he could hear Jameson’s reverberating voice as though it were generated in his own eardrums.

“Radius into circumferance is pi!

Scary to you, but never to I!

Balance equations? You’re utterly foiled!

But simple to me! I simply use FOIL!”

Flying almost like a bird in the low gravity, Boddy paid little attention to which level he was on. Enough to leap through a random door in order to fool the pursuing Jameson. He didn’t look behind him to see how close Jameson was, but that taunting voice grew more distant...

“Hunting you down is as easy as math!

A task for a champion master of math!

But to a poor fool with no knowledge of math,

This day will end in a Boddy bloodbath!”

Not today, Boddy thought as he ran through the doors, carefully shutting them so that they would not swing. Jameson would have no idea where he was. Actually, Boddy wasn’t sure himself ...

He looked around. It seemed to be the ground floor. Yes, he was in the right place, and judging by the emptiness of the hall, he was late for class again. Yes, always late. Jameson was right about one thing—he was indeed pathetic when it came to math. Running past the locker, he saw Mike making out with Natalie—Natalie, who should have been his girlfriend. But Mike had been nice enough to let him copy his homework—disapprovingly, but at least he understood.

Mike handed him a sheet of paper as he continued to suck Natalie’s tongue out. Boddy looked at the sheet, but found that the glare of the overhead lights obscured what was written. He squinted, held the paper close to his face, but only made out some nonsense letters. He quietly entered the classroom. Professor Fritz was asleep at his desk; good. Boddy quietly tiptoed across the classroom, hoping not to awaken anyone. He was lucky; the seat next to Natalie’s desk was empty. As long as no one woke up, perhaps he could undress her.

He sat, saw that the test was already set out for him. Everyone else was finished, otherwise they wouldn’t be asleep. He couldn’t see the test very well, but he confidently worked through the math, showing his work, the numbers clicking into place in his brain as though he were a human calculator. Balancing equations? Easy! Solving the value of the slope of a curved line? Child’s play! He marked off the problems, one by one, with big red check marks.

Then, once again confident in his command presence, handed the test to Jameson. “Good work, but ten points off for mutiny.”

Jameson, red-faced, shoulders sagged, nodded. “Sorry.”

Sorry. And that was the end of it. Sorry.

Boddy felt entitled to a drink. Samuels joined him in the lounge and listened to Boddy’s bizarre tale.

Slugging a beer, Samuels couldn’t help laughing at the spectacle of a slummy-dressed Jameson chasing Boddy while rapping.

“Funny to you,” Boddy said, “I was scared out of my wits. I mean, the rap was the scariest part; I couldn’t explain why.”

“Are you sure—absolutely positive—that this really happened?”

“I’m a lot of things, but delusional is not one of them.”

Samuels nodded. “I know that—I mean, ordinarily I’d know that. But I’ve got to tell you, that’s the strangest story I’ve heard today.”

“Dennis—what the hell is going on?”

“I wish to God I knew. But I can tell you this—I didn’t really want to mention it, I’ve got to work with Jameson every day, I like to try to get along with him, but this whole mutiny thing doesn’t really sound so off-the-wall.”

Boddy leaned his forehead against his fists, then let his fists fall to the tabletop. “So he’s been talking about it?”

Samuels nodded. “Not specifically about mutiny, but he hasn’t exactly been quiet about his displeasure with your command style. Matter of fact he’s gotten pretty virulent about it lately, especially since things started to, uh, go weird. And that, uh, rap, pretty well sums up his opinion of you. He thinks a relativistic spaceship needs to be run by someone who understands the mathematics of what’s happening to us.”

“Aw, bull. Does Mr. Math Genius understand what’s going on?”

“No, and I think that’s got him rattled.”

Boddy took a swig of his beer. “It’d rattle anyone.”

They sat in silence for a few moments, contemplating the unnerving goings-on. All the laugh had bled out of Samuels.

Then Boddy said quietly, “Whatever is going on, whatever strange things we see—we eventually snap back. Things return to normal. There seem to be intervals of normalcy followed by ever more ridiculous spurts of these...surreal...I don’t know what to call them...episodes. Do you agree?”

Samuels nodded. “So far.”

“And...whether these events are really taking place or are just figments of our imagination, the structure of the ship, solid, measurable objects are not affected?”

“Well, they seem to be, sometimes, like Felter’s brick wall or your college classroom—but yeah, things seem to snap back into their proper place. You’re asking if there’s an objective reality we can use as a point of reference?”

“Yeah. For instance, when Felter and I couldn’t remember how many people were on the ship, I referred to the mission profile. That’s something I can count on, right? Something permanent, concrete?”

“I think so—I want to be cautious about saying absolutely so, but I’d much sooner accept mass hallucinations than some literal shifting around of the reality of the ship.”

“Me, too.” Boddy thought for a moment, took another sip of beer—relishing the delightful feeling that he was beginning to feel a bit drunk, God, how he could stand to be drunk right now! “Okay, so whether these are hallucinations or some real phenomenon associated with relativity or even our distance from Earth, we can still depend on physical reality as something permanent. So that being the case, I can start a log to keep track of these events, and it should serve as something we can all relate to, and maybe start to piece things together.”

“Right—as well as a reference for the way things really are, or are supposed to be. Like the mission profile. We can refer to that to determine whether our memories and subjective experiences are true.”

“I sure hope that’s true. I could have sworn there were nine of us—I keep wondering if there are two people who have simply ceased to exist, who we simply have no memory of, and the mission profile is different now. Like some sort of editing of history.”

Samuels laughed. “Oh, that’s way too scary a thought for me to take seriously. God, I hope that’s not true—I mean, come on, man, it couldn’t be true. That just can’t happen. Ask Einstein, or Hawking, or Thorne. You can’t violate causality.”

“Maybe not—I hope not.” But Felter was gone when Jameson attacked me—he was just gone and I thought nothing of it... “What about our rotation—this close to the speed of light, we’re rotating—one side of the ship has got to be periodically undergoing vastly different relativistic effects than the other side. What could that do to us? I mean, the tidal forces at the very least—“

“We accounted for all that. The difference isn’t significant, either in rate of time dilation or in tidal effects. But you might be on to something there—considering the amount of energy we’re carrying—we might be somehow destabilizing the canceling out of backward and forward perturbations in time caused by electromagnetic radiation.”

“What? You lost me.”

Samuels finished up his beer, then pressed the call button to order another one. “Not a lot of people know this, but electromagnetic radiation sends waves both forward and backward in time. We don’t pay any attention to those waves because they cancel each other out—kind of like if you introduced P-waves which exactly negated S-waves in a given surface, you’d end up with a flat surface. The backwards and forward perturbations in time cancel each other out, so effectively they’re not there. But it is a significant phenomenon because it proves, at least theoretically, that backwards time travel is possible.”

“So what electromagnetic radiation are we talking about in this case?”

Samuels’ second beer emerged from the cabinet, extended on a metal platform. He grabbed it and took a slug. “Well, any. Remember how our drive system works. We cancel the electromagnetic interaction between the matter of the ship—and of our bodies—with the zero-point field. There could be something to that, especially with the high kinetic energy and the ship’s rotation. We’re fooling the universe into thinking we have no mass or inertia. Could be we’ve overlooked some geometrical consequence of that.”

Boddy chuckled. “If so, I’ll never let Jameson live it down.”

“But I’m just tossing ideas into the air. This can’t even be properly called a hypothesis. It’s a vaguely drunk and very confused assistant scientist chatting it up with his buddy.”

“I understand that, but it gives you something to go on, doesn’t it? A starting point?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I’ll take it up with Jameson—if he’s in the mood to talk rather than mutiny.”

Boddy drained his beer. Whatever effects it might have on his brain were preferable to the psychedelic experience of this morning.

Jameson was rattled, frightened, embarrassed, and a whole host of other emotions not common for him. As a mathematician, he had become proficient at shutting off emotion, and proud of his ability to do so. But from the giant rat to the acid trip of a chase through sections of the ship that didn’t even exist, he felt himself losing his grasp of the one thing he knew to be real: reality.

He returned to the lab—from where, he couldn’t be sure—and sat, thinking, trying to reason out what was going on. It had to have something to do with relativity, but what? Einstein’s equations didn’t predict anything like this; hell, even the most bombed-out string theorist had never suggested that approaching the speed of light would cause a spaceship to turn into some wild dreamscape, for objects to appear and disappear...or, on the other hand, was quantum mechanics the answer? What else could it be? Only subatomic particles behaved the way the macro universe was now behaving. Perhaps the high energy of their velocity had some effect on the probability of large quantities of matter changing their state—but that still made no sense. Particles had been accelerated to just under the speed of light in the past and none had taken on properties that were not predicted by the math.

Well, one thing he was sure of: Ed Boddy had to go. Oh, perhaps not by brandishing dangerous weapons and chasing him through the ship, but it was clear that the Eldorado had the wrong commander. The problem was getting the rest of the crew to go along with him.

Under other circumstances, Jameson might have hesitated at taking so bold a step, might have realized that he was setting in motion a chain of events that could well end in discord and conflict that could destroy the mission more thoroughly than Boddy’s passive incompetence, but he was in no frame of mind to think such things through to their conclusion. At the moment his only question was who to approach first.

Definitely not Samuels. Yes, Samuels was his assistant, and the person he was closest to on the ship (which wasn’t saying much), but he was also Boddy’s friend. No, he couldn’t confide in Samuels, at least not yet. No, the first thing he had to do was feel out the other members of the crew, probe to see if they felt as he did. To do that, he would have to start some conversations—never his strongest talent.

He blanked his screens and headed out into the corridor, thankful that the ship’s layout remained consistent. Where to go first?... The control center would be too conspicuous. He might wander down to the engine room to chat with Garr and Acker, but he surmised they were busy. Still, busy or not ...

When he arrived in the engine room, he found, not to his surprise, the two engineers bent over the manual access panel for the circulating pump. “Garr,” he said.

Garr peeked out from the open panel. “Jameson? What the hell do you want?”

“I won’t keep you.”

“Better not.”