It was as if Elliot had awakened from anesthesia to find himself buried up to his neck in sand. The sensation of being pulled together abated with a deafening clap as his limbs snapped in an ‘X’ and he crumpled onto the steel grating. As he gathered to his feet and stood, it seemed for an instant Sheila and Vance lay before him, upside-down, with red, blue and green ghosts vibrating out their bodies.
He was dizzy and tired. The grating of the Illious spun below his feet as he walked and he leaned forward on his padded panels. His forehead rested in the viewing cradle with the contact pins tingling against his temples as his thoughts aimed the cameras below their transport. White dwarf stars shined in a distant triangle and burning grew within his chest.
The dark space seemed to move outward as he breathed their cabin’s cold air.
Sheila stood and turned to Vance. Her presence allured when she spoke and anger flashed within her sleek cobalt eyes. Her diagonal scar was as thick as a welding bead. It crossed her beautiful face and twitched near her lips, “Because I’m a physicist, Vance. I know you’re the math genius. What do you really know about Unified Field Theory? The engineers couldn’t account for every last quark in our bodies and the Ilious.” She stepped forward. “It was too complex to predict.”
Vance sat in the opposing, two-man viewing station, propping himself with his thin hands, “We’re—we’re not orbiting Jura. We’ve crashed. If we trusted the ship—something above us, incredibly big like some giant wall. I have to interrogate the quantum gates and verify the problem.”
Elliot’s white vapor breath spread before his face. “You can’t debug the system, Vance.”
Vance’s eyes narrowed. “How can you know that?” He stood, flexing his hands like an arthritic old man. “It’s freezing in here.”
“Something’s wrong with the ship’s heating,” Elliot said. “It’s forty—forty-five degrees tops. It’s colder outside, though. Deep space isn’t kind to the human body. We’ve got to think quickly.”
Sheila walked toward a cabinet. “We can’t stay in here.”
“This is stupid,” Vance said, “Don’t act insane.”
Sheila turned from the cabinet. “It’s locked.” She jerked on the handle and looked up. “That’s perfect.” Her palm pounded the cabinet. “Vance, do you have the code to unlock this?”
“Yes.”
“Give it to me.”
Vance turned away, shivering. “Why do you want the suits, Sheila?”
“Quit playing games!”
Elliot stood. “We’ve all used our cradles to look below the ship.”
“We can’t trust the cradles,” Vance retorted.
“The cartography’s all wrong,” Elliot said. “The white dwarfs, they shouldn’t be there. We’re not inside the Milky Way. I can’t even identify the Milky Way from out here. There’s too many candidates.”
“You really have worthless thoughts, Elliot,” Vance said. “The cradles are showing us a frozen image. It’s a viewer malfunction.”
Elliot turned toward his cradle, then looked up. “If something went wrong, the ship would travel continuously through space. But we materialized here.”
Vance stood, glaring at him.
Elliot pointed at Vance’s cradle, “We’re nowhere near Tau Ceti. Something... something happened. If you’re theory’s right, Vance, then, the universe is spatially flat and finite, with a modest expansion rate. Right? So we’re somewhere near the edge of the universe. Billions of years have passed instead of only twelve.”
Vance raised a halting hand, “It’s too soon to—”
“Mankind is extinct.”
Vance winced, then turned. He walked away from Elliot and bent over; his necked jerked as he gurgled with pea-green vomit splashing and spreading in streamlets.
“Jesus Christ!” Sheila’s face disappeared in a cloud of her breath as she backed into a cabinet. “Vance?” She turned from him. “I suppose it’s possible. But somehow I can’t... I can’t wrap my head around if it’s...”
Vance wiped his mouth. “I know you, Elliot.” He looked at his wet hand. “You’re above everyone, right? With your celibacy—your aloof mind games—playing devil’s advocate. This isn’t a game. But it’s what you wanted. To say stupid things—make us stupid.” He coughed with his hands on his knees.
“You wanted to prove something,” Elliot said. “Prove you trusted your Topology theorems with your life. But I don’t care what people said. Those people are dust now. They’re dust, spinning around the cold Earth with its burnt-out Sun. And we didn’t age one second as we traveled through space all those years. Because energy doesn’t age. That’s what’s really happened here. Right Vance?” He glared at him. “It doesn’t matter.” He glanced at each of them. “We need to leave the ship.”
“Wait,” Vance said.
“Whatever our situation is, no ones coming to rescue us.”
Vance coughed. “Wait. Let me think.” He looked up to the hatch, then walked to his cradle and sat.
Elliot and Sheila waited.
“We,” Vance looked up at them, “We can’t stay in here.”
He stood and unlocked the compartment and they suited up.
Elliot waited for his turn to climb the access ladder.
“The airlock.” Vance lowered his leg back onto the rung. “Strange?” He looked down to them. “It’s blurry... somehow? I don’t know how to explain it. What I’m seeing has this—this feeling to it. The airlock feels empty up there... it feels like the airlock isn’t there at all.”
Elliot adjusted the tuning of his voice relay near the waist of his suit. “Just go.”