We were all strapped into our seats on the main bridge. Chi’s empty couch reminding us all of our loss and the strange planet Earth beneath us filling us with wonder about what we’d have found down there. Would the beginnings of mankind be there, but in tiny groups which were not impacting on the rest of the planet? Maybe, instead, some virus had wiped out the early tribes, leaving the other animals in peace on the beautiful virgin world. Now, we’d never know, for we were about to make a hyperspace jump back to the worlds of Trappist-1.
‘Why the delay?’ asked Tosh.
‘Shh!’ said Anna. ‘Have to get this right.’
Mary looked over her shoulder at the doctor and whispered, ‘Anna’s waiting until the distance almost exactly matches our jump from planet D back to Earth. The orbits of both planets are changing and the match is less than a minute away.’
‘Thirty seconds,’ said Anna.
We all took the straws into our mouths so that, while our bodies were frozen in hyperspace, we could take in fluid. The journey should last around ninety minutes.
‘Ten,’ said Anna.
Keeping my head still, I took a last look at the pristine Earth filling the view to the left side of Spirit.
‘Three, two, one, zero,’ said Anna.
I was frozen again. My entity managed to redirect my eyes towards the dashboard clock. The seconds began to accumulate. Now, all we could do was wait. We were travelling somewhere in the hidden or dark matter universe but were we also crossing the boundaries of the entiroverse? Perhaps we’d emerge at Haven and there would be no sign of the Rimor or our instruments on the surface. We’d know soon enough. I sucked on my straw. Fine, the fruit juice flowed exactly how it should. At least that worked properly.
I watched the clock pass ninety minutes. It seemed an age before Spirit left hyperspace and we were all thrown forward, restrained by our harnesses. Haven was in front of us, its depressingly grey land areas and black coastlines immediately recognisable.
‘Less than a quarter of a second,’ said Anna.
‘What?’ asked Bill.
Mary answered, ‘Our travel time was less than a quarter of a second different from the D to Earth journey.’
‘Nought point nought seven two seconds,’ Anna said. ‘Negligible over a ninety-minute journey.’
‘You’ve managed to reverse the last journey then?’ I asked.
‘What about the reversed entry and exit from hyperspace?’ Tosh asked.
‘Yes. That worked as predicted, exactly opposite to the turns we made from D to Earth,’ said Mary. ‘We should be in the exact universe we left here. Have you found the Rimor?’
‘Yes,’ said Tosh. ‘Got it. Just analysing its clock and position. Anna, I’ve just sent its current position to your monitor. Can you compare it to where it should be?’
We were motionless in our couches, still strapped in. No one daring to move until we had the crucial answers.
‘Exact match,’ said Anna.
‘The clocks match to a hundredth of a second,’ said Tosh. ‘We appear to be back in the universe we left.’
‘That’s only one jump,’ I said. ‘Can you reproduce the others, Mary?’
I watched the two girls poring over their consoles. Streams of numbers like stock-exchange figures crossed their screens then began to fly up the screen rapidly; columns of unintelligible digits, or, at least, unintelligible to me.
Eventually, Mary swivelled her seat towards those behind her. ‘The jump between Quietus and D can’t be reproduced in distance from Haven to D. It’s too close. Anna’s checking the orbits of Haven and planet G. Looks as if we might get a match there.’
‘Patience, guys,’ said Anna. ‘This is going to take a couple of hours.’
I looked at Tosh’s screen and was shocked. ‘Do you think that’s a good idea, bud?’
‘I had to see – to be sure,’ Tosh said, his voice cracking up.
The monitor showed the view from one of the cameras we’d left at our landing site on Haven. From right to left, I could see the oily surface of the sea and the unpleasant mat of the plant emerging from the water and stretching about six metres inland. Then some bare land and the dark rectangle of Chi’s resting place with its incongruous red-painted grave marker.
‘Don’t beat yourself up. That jump wouldn’t have had any effect on what happened on Haven.’
‘I know,’ he said, gradually retaining his composure. ‘I guess it’s silly, but I had this slight hope that when we got back here, she might have suddenly appeared in her seat or the grave might’ve gone and I’d know she was still alive somewhere in the entiroverse.’
‘Anything interesting from the other surface instruments?’ I asked, hoping work might ease his distress.
‘Don’t know. I’ll check. The Quietus command module is still in orbit where we left it.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘The beacon we left on it is spot on schedule with its pulses, and the location is exactly as we predicted it would be.’
‘Looks as if we have reversed the D to Earth jump,’ said Mary. ‘Lunch, I think.’ She unstrapped herself and headed through to the common area. Bill and I followed, but Tosh and Anna remained glued to their consoles, she trying to plot an exact journey to match the Quietus to D jump, and he collating data from the Haven instruments, interspersed with fruitless inactive periods of mourning over Chi’s grave.
We mixed our dehydrated food with water, heated it where appropriate and floated in the common area with our lunches.
‘You know,’ said Mary, ‘the real problem is going to come when we try to return to Earth. There’s a little matter of missing mass.’
‘What, fuel used, you mean?’ asked Bill.
‘No, worse than that. We are missing an entire fuel tank and the second Rimor. That is a huge proportion of our original mass.’
‘We could collect the Rimor, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Could the plant get from it to Spirit along the connecting tunnel if it remained sealed at our end?’
‘Maybe not,’ said Mary, ‘but it could move across its hull and the outside of the tunnel to the outside of Spirit.’
‘Perhaps we should go and examine it. See if there is any sign of the plant anywhere on its hull,’ I suggested.
‘Even so,’ said Mary, ‘it’s the fuel tank which makes up the bulk of the missing mass. If we try the jump without that, there is no way we can reproduce the original jump, is there?’
‘And the weight of the probe we sent to Quietus,’ said Bill.
We all lapsed into silence.