Open Writing

Holly floated near the doors, alongside cell number
one in Sleep Center One and watched the life sign
readings climb through the green. SC1-1 was the most
prestigious position on the ship, and was reserved for the
mission’s number one citizen. After him, most other
positions were drawn by ordinary lot, but SC1-1 was
special.

Jacob Rattray was, had been, one of earth’s leading
politicians, but had differed from all the others in one
important respect: not only had he been one of the prime
movers in getting the mission off the ground, so to speak,
but he had been the only politician willing to go on the
mission himself. A widower with no children, he had
come alone, and everyone on board was grateful.

Holly had met a few politicians back on earth, and had
found them to be almost universally shallow, more
interested in themselves than the causes they purported to
advocate. Like the man who had recruited her, Senator
Eugene Rathbone, they were mostly out to secure power
and prestige for themselves. The aims of the mission
came a poor second to their personal ambitions.

Jacob Rattray had been the exception. He was that rare
being, an honest politician; or, as Serge Volkin had called
him cynically, a contradiction in terms. An oxymoron. As
opposed, the Russian would then grin, to all the other
politicians, who were just ordinary morons. For a
moment, Holly’s heart lurched at the thought of the
Russian, her spirits slumping and her emotions
threatening to crowd in on her. With an effort, she pushed
thoughts of Serge and the others from her mind. Not now,
she told herself again. Time for that later. When the
responsibility for the ship was no longer in her hands,
then she would grieve. Not now.

Holly studied the readouts again, then looked at the
plas front of the cell. As she watched, it cleared, a sign
that the process was almost complete. Holly suppressed a
shudder of terror as she realized that, had she possessed
the technical know-how, she would have denied the return
of oxygen to the sleepers. Had she done that, she knew,
then she would have been, however unknowingly,
responsible for their deaths.

She touched a control set to one side of the cell, and
the plas slid aside. The distinguished figure of Jacob
Rattray lay unmoving in the zero-gee of the sleep center.
All of his vital signs looked, to Holly’s untrained eye,
more or less normal; he should be waking up at any time
now. While she waited, Holly ran over in her mind
exactly what she was going to tell him. She had to get it
right first time, not confuse him with a lot of corrections
and doubling back. After all, this man would almost
certainly be the new world’s first President.

After a few minutes, she looked at the readouts again,
then at the man in the cell; he ought to be awake by now.
Hesitantly, she reached out a hand and gently shook him,
lightly gripping his upper arm so as not to cause him to
float all over the compartment. There was no reaction,
and Holly began to feel the first stirrings of apprehension;
then, blessedly, his eyelids began to flutter, and she
breathed a sigh of relief. Slowly, the great white head
turned towards her, and the eyes opened. Holly looked
into those eyes, expecting to see the familiar deep
intelligence of this great humanitarian. But what she
actually saw, she did not immediately understand.

The brown eyes of the politician gazed blankly, not
even directly at her, but only in her general direction in
bovine indifference, unable to differentiate between her
and a piece of furniture. The thin arms rose weakly,
flailing at the air, while the man’s tongue lolled from the
corner of his mouth, and unintelligible sounds escaped
him.

Holly recoiled, stunned. What on earth… What was
wrong with him? Was he sick, a reaction to the cryosleep,
perhaps? The man began to roll out of the cell, and she
pushed him back in and closed the plas front. Inside the
compartment, the man’s actions were becoming more
frantic, arms flapping and legs kicking weakly as he
sought to escape. Holly took the only action she could.
She initiated the cryosleep sequence again, and sent him
back to sleep. She could not deal with someone in his
condition now; she needed help, not another liability.

Holly hung in the air, grasping one of the handholds.
What now? Who do I know who wasn’t on my shift? The
answer came almost immediately; Captain Patel! Of
course! The man who would eventually pilot the ship into
orbit around Procyon VII. He was the obvious person to
turn to.

She reached a computer terminal and brought up the
list again; Captain Patel was in SC8-11. Sleep Center
eight was near the bridge, which was where Patel would
be needed when they reached their destination. Quickly
she made her way through the ship towards the last of the
adult sleep centers. SC9 and 10 contained the one
thousand children on board, those under the age of
eighteen. A chill went through her as she thought of the
children. She still did not know what had been wrong
with Rattray, but an icy apprehension was beginning to
settle on her, a feeling of oppression whose source she
neither knew nor understood. But with no other course to
take, she hurried on.

* * *

The plas front of SC8-11 cleared, and Holly watched
the sleeping form within. Ship’s Captain Ramesh
Krishnamurthi Patel still showed no signs of waking, and
Holly once again began to feel concern. He should be
conscious by now, she thought. It had been more than two
hours since she had begun the sequence, and Holly felt
the dread settling over her again. Pushing it away,
determined not to surrender to despair, she looked again
at the readouts; all were well into the green, and she
touched the control that opened the front of the cell.

But still the man inside did not move. He lay perfectly
still, the only signs that he was alive being the cell’s
readouts and the rise and fall of his chest. Holly watched
him carefully; his eyes were closed, and his fine,
aristocratic features seemed to be carved from dark
marble. Hesitantly, Holly reached into the compartment to
clear away a small residue of gel from the man’s face.

With shocking suddenness, the Indian pilot’s eyes flew
open and his hand grasped Holly’s wrist with inhuman
strength, pulling her towards him. Holly struggled, trying
to break away. She looked at his face and into his eyes,
and saw only madness, a feral staring that saw neither her
nor its surroundings as they really were. God only knew
what those eyes saw. Holly struggled, held in the grip of
lunacy as the man’s mouth gaped and the strong, white
teeth gnashed, spittle flying in the weightless air. With a
last despairing effort, she pulled free and punched the
closing control. The plas slid shut on the man from
Bombay, cutting off the guttural animal sounds he was
making, and Holly drew back from the cell, breathing
deeply, her heart pounding. After a moment she
approached again and activated the cryosleep, watching
until the creature inside subsided into unconsciousness.

Holly watched dully; creature is the right word, she
thought as her pulse rate slowed to somewhere near
normal. Whatever it might have once been, it was no
longer human. With a last glance around the oval room,
she left the center and headed for the bridge.

It took Holly all of the rest of that shipboard day and
most of the next before she felt she was ready to try to
bring the main matrix of the computer on line. She had
taken frequent breaks, and had spent much of that time
staring at the stars, and thinking. Now, she sat in the
captain’s chair, guiltily, feeling like an intruder, as if she
didn’t belong there. Then she reasoned that its true
occupant would have little use for it now, would probably
not even know what it was.

She had slept little over the past thirty-six hours;
during that time, she had thought through the complete
mystery of the sleepers. When she was able to sit down
and think about it, the answer became obvious. Initially,
when she had at first thought the colonists were all dead,
it had been because she had assumed that they would
require as much oxygen as someone who was awake, such
as herself. However, a few moment’s quiet thought had
soon cleared that up. But such was her relief at
discovering that she was not, after all, alone in the
terrifying vastness of the ship, let alone space, she had
failed to extrapolate the thought to its logical conclusion.

The sleepers had been without oxygen for between
eight and eleven hours, but their metabolism was such
that they required only approximately one hundredth of
the normal amount. Nevertheless, that still meant that
their brains had been starved of oxygenated blood for the
equivalent of between three and a half and more than five
minutes. Long enough to cause brain damage ranging
from minimal to almost total, depending on the person
afflicted.

And the form that the damage took also varied from
person to person, as evinced by the two people she had
revived, with such disastrous results. One of them,
Councilor Rattray, had been affected to the extent that he
was severely mentally retarded, probably to the level of
babyhood, and almost certainly irreversible. In the case of
Captain Patel, the damage was manifested in a completely
different way. The man had, like Rattray, shown signs of
severe mental retardation, but he had also exhibited
symptoms of a dangerous psychosis. Holly was not a
doctor, or psychiatrist, but she had looked into the man’s
eyes, and had seen the madness there. She didn’t think she
needed a health professional to tell her that the Indian
Captain was violently insane.

Thinking of the results of her two attempts at
awakening, Holly fought down the now familiar feeling
of rising panic. Okay, she thought, okay, take it easy.
Think! That surely doesn’t mean that everyone on board
has been affected. Does it? The answer came back to her
almost immediately: most likely, but just as likely not to
the same extent. The minimum deprivation time seemed
to be a little more than four and a half minutes; there had
to be some who were only lightly affected, maybe even
normal. The problem was finding them, since the return
of oxygen to the sleepers had been totally random. And
because the higher functions of the computer had been
down during the operation, it would likely have no
memory of the sequence that was followed once it was
back on line.

Thinking that depressing thought brought her to her
main problem, what she saw as the Big One. In just about
one month or so, the ship would be arriving at its
destination, the Procyon system. Before that happened, it
would have to be turned over and decelerated from its
present velocity of twenty million klicks per hour to a
slower, much more manageable velocity, and then
brought into orbit around the seventh planet in the system.

Even with the higher functions of the computer in
operation, someone would have to oversee and control
that final part of the journey. Whatever happened, she was
going to need help.

Unfortunately, the only help within almost eleven light
years seemed to be either basket cases or potential axe
murderers. Holly slumped in the chair and chewed that
pleasant little thought over in her mind.

What the hell was she going to do?

Presently, Holly roused herself and looked again at the
view that presented itself as she gazed forward through
the observation bubble attached to the bridge. The huge
clear portal, made from an amalgam of silicone and the
amazing alien metal found in the asteroid belt that
increased its strength in proportion to the pressure it was
subjected to, gave a magnificent view of the way ahead,
and their ultimate destination, Procyon A.

The star still appeared as a shining golden marble, and
its dwarf companion was now visible to the naked eye.
They did not seem to have drawn any closer to the pair in
the last two days – God, was it only two days – nor should
they have. They still had the best part of fourteen billion
klicks to go, more than four weeks given the deceleration
required, and Holly knew she was going to need all of that
time, and at its end would wish she had more.

Still, she looked ahead, contemplating the infinite vista
before her. The forward dome, like a miniature
firmament, almost gave her the impression that she was
back on earth, ‘star-gazing’ as her mother had called it,
from her bedroom window in the dreary housing estate,
before she had gone off to school in Baton Rouge. With
no atmosphere to dull their brilliance, it seemed that the
stars shone just for her. Gone was the coy, twinkling
bashfulness with which they graced the earth. Out here,
the observer had entered their territory; here, she was the
intruder, alone and out of her depth. Here, the stars didn’t
merely shine, they blazed.

Holly didn’t think of earth very often; none of them
did, a defense mechanism against homesickness, she
supposed. The long sleeps between shifts served one
purpose in that respect; as far as Holly was concerned, she
had left earth only two months ago. That was the total
time she had been awake; the fact that almost two
hundred years had passed on earth was not something she
could easily grasp. Being alone, however, was not
supposed to be part of the equation.

That thought, intruding as it did on her musing,
brought her back to the reality of her situation, and she
pushed it aside, returning her attention to her more
immediate problems. With the return of oxygen to the
sleepers they were, whatever their mental condition, safe.
At least for now. She was therefore free to concentrate on
her other problem: the computer.

Reluctantly, Holly looked away from the forward
bubble and drifted over to the main doors of the bridge.
As she did so, it also occurred to her that she would have
to do something about her personal fitness; spending too
much time in zero-gee was not good for the body, and it
wouldn’t do to begin deceleration and find she was unable
to walk or even stand once gravity returned.

She passed through the doors, and they sighed shut
behind her. Pausing only to collect a few tools she might
need, Holly made her way to the computer center. One
way or another, the next few days would determine what
happened to the mission, the ship, the sleepers and her.
Pulling herself along by the handholds in the corridor
walls, Holly Louise Parmentier drifted through the silent
vessel. As she went, she became more and more aware
that not all ghosts are of the dead.

Shivering in the warmth of her suit, she hurried on.