Turning Spirit with its fragile attachment to the asteroid, took more than forty minutes, then the rotation had to be slowed to a stop and extremely gentle thrust applied to move us out of the asteroid belt which was situated just beyond the orbit of Arctur. We also had to avoid any collision risk, however remote.
Eventually, we cleared the debris field and, under conventional power, made very slow progress towards Arctur, from where Mary was sure we could get the most accurate journey distance back to Earth. Travelling millions of miles in hyperspace made distances appear trivial, but the two million miles we were now traversing back to the ice world seemed to take an age. We couldn’t accelerate quickly without endangering our connection to the rock, so Mary had calculated a gentle increase in speed to midway, then the same deceleration to bring us back into the geosynchronous orbit above Stroya’s location. We’d then have a twelve-day wait for our distance to Earth to be as near a match as possible to our original journey.
‘Hello, Stroya, Tosh here. We’re back in orbit above you.’
It was a while before she replied, ‘Good to hear from you, Tosh. You’ve been back to Earth?’
‘No, Stroya. All of that time has been spent adjusting the mass of our ship ready to return to Earth, but we wanted to make contact with you to let you know we are almost ready to go.’
‘Thank you, Tosh. We hope you will return. You know how important it is for us. Some people down here think we’ll never hear from you again.’
‘We know how serious it is. We’ll talk to our government as soon as we can and plan a mission to help you. We’ll try to bring temporary relief in the form of food, then we’ll work out how to help you get back to Herade,’ said Tosh, confidently, but then, in a less positive tone of voice he added, ‘but you must understand that it is our government which will have the final say.’
‘Yes. We understand but cannot imagine any intelligent species would wish to abandon us.’
‘No, neither can we. You can be certain that we will be making the best possible case for an early return. Count on it. We have twelve days before we can depart, so let us tell you more about humans and ask more about you and your culture.’
‘That would be good, Tosh.’
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
The time leading up to departure crept by. We all wanted to get home, not just to Earth, but the home we knew, with all of our friends and relations. I still had this dreadful fear that I would return to Houston and discover that Linda and Jason were no longer there or, even worse, that she was married and living with some other husband and wouldn’t even know me. What on earth would I do in those circumstances? It would be no good raging at them. Somehow I would have to bury the distress and pain deep within me and get on with my life. None of us knew how many parallel worlds we had jumped during spolding and Mary gave us even more of a fright when she mentioned that it was possible that turning left or right entering and leaving the hidden universe might be a simplification. It could be that it wasn’t simply a ninety-degree turn. Perhaps ninety-one or eighty-nine took you to another completely different part of the entiroverse. Anna added an even more frightening possibility – that the universes were in motion in the entiroverse and we may never find our way back. Tosh argued that if that had been the case then we could not have returned to Trappist-1 and found everything how we had left it but that hardly defused the anxiety which I think we all felt about this journey.
With less than an hour to go, we were all strapped into our couches on the bridge. Anna had, extremely gingerly, turned Spirit to point towards Earth. We had our drinking straws ready for the journey and the countdown progressed, more and more slowly. For goodness sake, how long could each individual second last when you were willing it to be gone?
‘Zero!’ said Anna and we turned through ninety degrees into the dark universe.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
In our frozen state, we had no control over our eyes, but my entity managed to swivel them so that I was looking out of the left cockpit window. The rock was there, travelling with us. Spolding hadn’t torn it off. At least that seemed to have worked properly.
The ninety-three minutes passed even more slowly than the previous sixty, but, eventually, we were thrown forward and, directly in front of us, was Earth, in all its beauty.
I looked to the left to check the asteroid was still with us after our exit from hyperspace. We’d all entertained a fear that it might break free and become a dangerous missile heading towards Earth, but no, it was still there.
‘Eureka! GPS satellites!’ shouted Tosh.
‘And I’ve got the ISS beacon,’ said Anna.
‘Capcom, Spirit here. Do you read us?’ I said over the radio.
We were still a hundred thousand miles out so it took my message a second or so to reach Houston. Five interminable seconds passed before the reply arrived.
‘Spirit. Houston here. Welcome back. How was your expedition?’
‘Eventful. My report is downloading as we speak. Be sure Neil gets it as soon as possible,’ I said.
We all looked at each other and there was more than one sigh of relief.
‘Copy that, Mark.’
‘Houston. We encountered a very dangerous plant while in the Trappist-1 system and need to organise quarantine. Who do I need to speak to?’ I asked.
‘Copy that, Mark. I’ll find out.’
I relaxed in my couch. It seemed we were back to the Earth we knew.
‘What do we do, Mark?’ asked Anna. ‘Our trajectory is taking us to an orbit at about four hundred miles. If you want a different one, I need to know in order to not damage our connection with the boulder.’
‘Can’t we just jettison it?’ asked Tosh.
‘No,’ said Mary. ‘We went to a lot of trouble with that rock. Let’s wait until we are a hundred per cent certain this is the same Earth we left.’
‘Seems like it to me,’ said Tosh, grumpily.
‘Patience, Tosh,’ I urged.
‘Spirit, Houston here. Just to let you know that Neil is here, but he’s reading your report before speaking to you. Over.’
‘Thanks, Houston. Out,’ I said.
‘All sounds good so far,’ said Bill.
‘Fingers crossed,’ I said.
Almost an hour later, the radio came back to life. ‘Hi, Mark. Neil here. Fascinating report.’
‘We’re heading to an orbit of three hundred and ninety miles, Neil. Is that okay?’ I said.
‘Yes, for now. We’ll get you closer to the ISS later, but I need to talk to you first. Put on the headphones, please,’ said Neil.
All of the others looked around at me sharply with puzzled expressions. What did this mean? What did Neil have to say to me that he didn’t want the others to overhear? My relaxed demeanour immediately tensed. Maybe we had encountered some other problem. Something was clearly wrong. I grabbed a set of headphones. The others watched anxiously as I placed them over my ears.
‘Headphones on, Neil. What’s up?’
‘Obviously, there is a lot in your report for us to take in, particularly the quarantine suggestions, but there is something else.’
‘Come on, Neil, spit it out. You’re worrying me, especially after the parallel worlds incident.’
‘Well, it is exactly that which is concerning me too. You mention losing Chi Wang.’
‘Yes.’
‘Careful what you are heard to say now, Mark, because Chi is sitting beside me. She wants to talk to Tosh. Did you know they have a thing going?’
‘What! That’s not possible. And yes, I knew.’
‘She never went. She was replaced by Penny Heston after the Mars mission as she came down with measles. Her entity was able to deal with it, but not in time for the Trappist launch, so we made the switch. Penny’s inclusion in the crew was agreed with the rest of you.’
‘Standby, Neil,’ I said, and to Tosh, ‘patch this through to my quarters,’ I said.
‘What’s up, Mark?’ asked Mary.
‘Leave it with me,’ I said and headed through to my cabin.
‘Come on. It obviously involves all of us,’ said Anna.
‘Give me some time. Still collating,’ I said as I closed my cabin door.
I plugged my headphones in and said, ‘Okay, Neil. We can talk freely now. Chi was definitely with us. I watched her die on Haven and helped bury her. This means we’re still not home. We’re still in another universe.’
‘Looks like it. So, where’s Penny?’ asked Neil.
‘I think we need to check all of the other personal relationships. Does Anna still have a partner here? He’s called Wally. Is Bill’s wife, Veronica, here? I don’t think Mary has a partner. God! What about Linda? – And Jason?’
‘Linda and the boy are fine, Mark. Mary lives alone. Give me a moment to check on Anna’s partner and Bill’s wife. I thought she was called Ronnie, though.’
‘Oh, yes, she is called Ronnie. She prefers it to Veronica.’
‘Okay. I’ll check on Wally. Standby.’
There was a knock on my cabin door.
‘Yes.’
Tosh poked his head around the door. ‘We noticed the call had finished. What’s happening, Mark? You have us all as worried as hell.’
‘Yes, sorry,’ I said. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll know more shortly.’
‘Come on, Mark. You can tell me.’
‘Tosh, please. I’m waiting for Neil to come back to me. I don’t want to say anything until I have the facts. I’ll be out soon.’
‘Mark.’
‘Tosh, just go! Please! Don’t force me to give you an order.’
I heard the door click shut. Internally, I was elated at Chi being alive but had a hollow pit in my stomach about what else could be wrong. Was my old flame, Penny, lying dead on Haven in some alternative universe? Perhaps she wasn’t dead, but the Spirit in this universe was yet to return and we’d crossed a subtle entiroverse boundary. I’d always had trouble getting my head around time paradoxes, but here we seemed to have a parallel universe paradox.
At any moment, Penny’s version of Spirit might return from its expedition and the rest of us would find ourselves duplicated. This Chi might be in a relationship with a different Tosh. What problems could that cause, and what if we all suddenly had doppelgängers?