Laenea was calling to him, she needed him, as he had needed her —
A raucous siren penetrated the last thin haze of transit sleep, dissolving Radu’s frightening dream. He fumbled for the latch on his body box. The lid clicked open and he pushed it aside and climbed out, made awkward by the remnants of anesthetic chemicals, and confused by memories recalled by his dream.
The dim light faded, and in the twilit last moment the ship began to spin. Its motion threw Radu against his sleep chamber. He struggled to his feet, reaching out to get his bearings in the darkness. But as he oriented himself toward the control room the synthetic gravity contracted, twisted, and flung him down.
This time he lay still, waiting for the ship’s convulsions to end. Waves lapped over him, slow and dry, not of water but of weight and weightlessness. His heart pounded and his vision turned scarlet against night. If the waves rose higher, they would crush him as easily as any angry sea.
But the oscillation slowed, gentled, and finally ceased. A circle of light from the port brightened the room: strange that the darkness before had appeared so complete. The ship had been spinning… now the patch of light remained in one place. Radu climbed to his feet. Beyond the port spun a red-orange star.
It should be yellow, he thought with a shock. It should be earth’s sun. But it’s a red giant.
The siren moaned to silence. Radu’s shirt was soaked at the armpits, and drops of sweat ran down his sides. Footsteps hurried down the corridor, but halted outside the box room.
Radu waited a moment, but nothing happened. He opened the door and came face to face with Vasili Nikolaievich.
“What’s wrong?”
The pilot gazed up at him in silence. His black eyes glittered as he searched Radu’s face, and his pale skin was flushed.
“What’s wrong?” Radu said again. “What’s the matter?”
“How do you feel?”
“How do I feel!” Perhaps transit did make pilots unstable, as rumor would have it. “I feel I ought to be responding to the emergency, if you’d tell me what it is.”
“The emergency is that you started to wake up in transit.”
Radu stared at him, all his reactions clamped into a tight ball in his chest. His heart pounded.
“The sensors protected you. They threw us back into normal space,” Vasili said calmly. “Don’t look so worried — you’re all right, they worked in time.”
Radu gazed down at his hands. They looked no different, but now he knew why the pilot had stared at him so intently, and why he had hesitated until Radu opened the door. They both knew how normal people died in transit.
“How could I wake up?”
Vasili shrugged. “A mistake in the anesthetic. An obstruction in the gas line. I don’t know.”
He no longer sounded upset, and Radu permitted himself to relax, too. He was, after all, alive, and apparently unchanged by his experience.
“Where are we?”
The pilot shrugged again, left Radu in the hatchway, and went to inspect the information panel of Radu’s body box.
“Then we’re lost?”
“I haven’t checked yet,” Vasili said without turning toward him. “I came to see what happened as soon as I got the ship stabilized. I’ve never left transit quite so abruptly before.”
Radu had never experienced leaving transit at all, having always gone through it sound asleep. He had wondered — as all crew members did — what he might see if he regained consciousness before he was supposed to. Now he had the evidence of his own confusion and bruises that the emergency sensors would prevent him from catching even a glimpse, at the risk of his life, of the spectacle the pilots kept so secret. If a crew member started to wake up, or slept too lightly, the sensors would always throw the ship out of transit and return it to normal space. The absolute certainty made Radu feel relieved, yet envious.
Vasili glanced at the display again. “I’ll chart our position. You do a blood chemistry and check the anesthetic feeds. Do it quickly — I want to get back on our way.”
He left Radu alone with the blinking machine that was supposed to protect him during flight. Radu set to work.
After several hours, his frustration increased as he looked for and failed to find any malfunction. The anesthetic, a gas, flowed smoothly and at the upper limit of concentration for someone of Radu’s size and age. His blood chemistry was well within normal limits except for high readings of adrenaline and its breakdown products. He had expected that. After what had happened, low or normal levels would have been unusual.
The shreds of his dream kept distracting him. Never before had he experienced a nightmare while he was asleep in transit. This was frighteningly like his hallucinations back on Twilight, just before he had become ill.
Stop scaring yourself, he thought. No wonder you’re having nightmares.
He frowned over the blood analysis. His knowledge of biochemistry was only superficial; he had to accept the information the programs gave him. The body sometimes rejected one drug and had to be switched to another. That was the only suggestion the computer offered. Radu could think of no other likely supposition.
This ship carried supplies of two other transit drugs. Radu factored the second choice for stress and noted the upper dosage limit. He left the information drifting above his box, set up the equipment, and returned to the control room.
“I’m ready.”
“Good,” Vasili said. “Did you find the problem?”
“Reaction against the anesthetic, I think.”
“That’s unusual.”
“It’s the only explanation that makes sense.” He paused. “Unless Atna was right. Or unless he really was sick and I’m coming down with whatever he had.”
Vasili snorted. “He wasn’t right, and you aren’t sick. Let’s go.”
In the box room, Radu rolled up his sleeve, exposed his wrist to the antiseptic light, and climbed into his box.
“The IV is ready,” he said. “It works quickly so I’ll wish you well now.”
Vasili knelt and picked up the IV needle in its sterile covering. His hand trembled, and he looked, if possible, even paler than usual.
“What’s the matter?” Radu asked.
Vasili hesitated. “I’m not very fond of needles, I thought I was done with them…”
Though Vasili did not show his scar, Radu had seen Laenea’s, and the other marks from the operations that had made her a pilot. He did not blame Vasili for his dislike of the needle. For a moment, Radu considered waking Orca up to help with the anesthetic. But that was ridiculous. Time aside, it would put her under a strain that was completely unnecessary.
“Can’t you use another drug?” Vasili tried to smile but succeeded only in looking faintly ill.
“I’d prefer to avoid it,” Radu said. The third-choice drug, though taken by mouth, had a range of unpleasant side effects. Radu wished for a transit drug that would migrate through the skin, but they all consisted of large organic molecules too complex for that procedure.
Vasili shook his head quickly. “Of course. I’m sorry.” He took Radu’s wrist in one hand, and steadied the needle.
The IV’s built-in topical anesthetic tingled against Radu’s inner arm, then numbed the skin. Vasili uncertainly guided the needle into a vein, digging so deep that the insertion hurt. Radu gritted his teeth.
The drug affected him almost instantly. He tried to lie down and felt himself falling.
The crystalline blackness of transit sleep formed solid around him.
o0o
Radu dreamed, as always; he dreamed again of Laenea. He could feel and smell and taste her. His hand slid gently from her breast across the ridged new scar. She whispered something that he could not quite hear, that he could not quite understand, and she laughed in the wonderful soft low way she had. Her hair swung down and caressed his shoulder and he twined the locks in his fingers.
She whispered again. “I love you.” His whispered back, “I love you.” She said a few more words. He thought she said, “I need you.” She leaned down and kissed him, on the lips, at his throat, on the palm of his hand. Then, suddenly, she bit him hard on the wrist, slashing tendons and arteries.
“I’m sorry,” she called to him. “I didn’t want to —”
She was very far away. Tears streaming down her face, she vanished. Radu struggled up, clutching at his wrist to stop the blood.
He woke expecting the dream to vanish, too, but blood ran down his hand and between his fingers. The world spun, as it had before. He scrabbled for the lock on his box and flung the lid open. The lights flickered and dimmed; the gravity pulsed in waves.
Dangling from his wrist by a crumpled piece of tape, the bloody needle dripped fluid from its point.
Radu jerked it loose and flung it away and clamped his left hand across the long gash where the needle had torn out. His head throbbed: He had come out of unconsciousness far too quickly.
Unable to use his hands to push himself out of the box, he braced his elbow on the chamber’s edge, rolled over, and landed on his knees on the floor.
Vasili Nikolaievich slammed open the door.
“What in the bloody flaming hell is happening?”
Radu managed to rise to one knee. He lurched to his feet. Vasili caught him and supported him. Radu’s dark shirt stayed the same color, where blood stained it, but the spots were shiny. Blood oozed between his fingers. He was surprised at the warmth.
He had ripped out the needle from base to tip, cutting a long gash. A good suicide cut. It would leave a scar, unless he went to some trouble to have it removed. Anyone who saw it would assume he had tried seriously to take his own life. The thought angered and embarrassed him.
“I taped the needle in!” Vasili said.
Radu took an unsteady step forward. “I tore it out myself, I think. I must have. I couldn’t stay asleep. I can’t —”
“You have to,” Vasili said.
o0o
By the time Vasili finished cleaning the gash on Radu’s wrist, Radu feared the pilot was near fainting. He worked with his teeth clenched, in silence, a little clumsily, as if his eyes were focused just to one side of the gash. Radu put pressure on it while Vasili fetched bandages. Tissue repair would have to wait, for Vasili could not even try it. The bleeding stopped, but the stinging pain continued.
Holding the bandage, Vasili stopped an arm’s length from Radu.
“Give it to me.” Radu took the package. But when he tried to tear it open, he dropped it on the floor. He gazed at it stupidly. His strength continued to drain away.
The pilot closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, scooped up the bandage, and tore off its covering with a violent jerk.
Once he had covered the wound he was able to work more easily. He bound it too tightly, but Radu did not have the heart to ask him to do it over. He was obviously being affected by Radu’s presence. The longer he stayed near, the more uncomfortable Radu felt, too. His pulse began to speed up again, and each beat of his heart made the deep cut throb.
Vasili finished the bandage and stepped back, looking as relieved as Radu that he was done.
“Thank you,” Radu said.
Vasili went quickly to the sink and washed away the blood.
Radu stood shakily, flexing his fingers. The needle had missed all the tendons, but the troubling dream forced him to keep reassuring himself that he could still use his hand. The dream confused him. His dreams in transit had always been pleasant, except these two times when he had awakened.
He tried to push Atnaterta’s vision from his memory. He failed.
“Vasili Nikolaievich, can you contact earth?”
“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I don’t mean now, of course. I meant from transit. I —” No, he could not tell Vasili what he had dreamed. “A friend of mine, Laenea Trevelyan —”
Vasili sighed. “You have to leave her alone,” he said. “If she weren’t so damned stubborn you two would never have got together, it would have been better if you hadn’t. But if you don’t stay away from her, you’ll destroy her. Can’t you understand that?”
“I understand perfectly!” Radu said angrily. He hated to be reminded of what common knowledge, and common talk, he and Laenea were. “Our friendship is none of your business, but all I wanted anyway was to find out… to find out…” He tried to explain what he did want to find out. “… if her first transit flight went well,” he said lamely.
“I can’t call earth, or anyplace else, from transit,” Vasili said. “In any case, you’ll be asleep. You’ll just have to wait till we get home.”
They went back to work, maintaining an irritable silence. Neither Radu nor Vasili could discover why Radu had awakened this time. Perhaps blood had clotted in the needle; if so, the clot had dislodged when Radu ripped the IV out. Perhaps the open tip had pressed against the inside of the vein. The computer made the same suggestion it had before: anesthetic rejection. Discomforting to have that happen twice in a row.
Radu opened the drug locker and took down a vial of capsules, the third transit drug.
“Do you know where we are?” he asked the pilot.
“I haven’t had a chance to plot our location,” Vasili said, his voice strained. He avoided Radu’s gaze, but added quickly, “I’m sure I’ll have a course by the time you’re asleep.”
All Radu could do was take the drug. He stepped into the body box, sat down, opened the vial, and poured pills into his hand. His dose was five. He counted carefully, as if it were a difficult task.
He swallowed the capsules dry and lay down. As his shoulders sank into the padding, he felt the drug begin to work.
o0o
Again, he woke from the nightmare; again, everything went wrong. He came to awareness retching and screaming, clawing at the top of his sleep chamber without even the wit to reach for the latch. Laenea cried out in his mind, and he knew that she was dying.
As so many he had dreamed about had died.
Radu saw Vasili’s pale face through the thick glass above him.
“Stay asleep! Don’t wake up!” The pilot’s terrified voice penetrated the heavy lid. “Damn you, stay asleep!”
The latch popped open, but Radu could not lift the lid and Vasili’s weight too. He fought to escape and he knew he could not succeed. He was going to faint, but the unconsciousness would not be deep enough to shield him from transit. This time, he would die.
With his last bit of strength he lurched against the chamber lid and flung it open. Struck by its edge, Vasili reeled back and fell, thudding hard against a bulkhead.
On his hands and knees beside his box, Radu coughed and panted. Bile stung sour and hot in his throat and tears of rage and frustration and relief streamed down his face. He was shaking violently.
When he finally got control of himself, he forced himself to stand. Vasili stood pressed against the wall, his hands spread on the smooth metal surface. Saying nothing, Radu went to wash his face and rinse the foul taste from his mouth.
When he glanced up, dripping, into the mirror, he was surprised that he looked very much the same as always. His hair was more rumpled than usual. Random damp locks, darkened by the water, clung to his forehead. His shirt was filthy, and it stank. He took it off and flung it toward the cleaner. It fell into the bin, but nothing happened. Most of the ship was still in transit mode, so even the semi-intelligent machines were down. The air felt chilly on his bare chest and arms. He stripped and put on clean clothes from his locker. The familiar tasks eased his agitation; even the nausea slowly went away.
What’s happening to me? he thought.
In the control room, Vasili gazed into the course computer’s display. He looked up, his expression troubled.
“The ship can’t go through that again.”
“No more can I,” Radu said.
They stared at each other, neither knowing what to say.
“Well. Maybe once more,” Vasili said.
“Once more! With what? That was the last transit drug!”
“I know it’s impossible to take two at once — but could you raise the dose of one of them?”
“My dose is already calculated at the threshold of toxicity. If I took more — if I woke up at all, I’d wake up as a vegetable.”
Vasili glanced toward the computer display. It disintegrated and reformed into a sphere representing the ship’s immediate surroundings. A star burned brightly just off center, and around it crept its inner family of planets, their sizes exaggerated, their colors enhanced.
Vasili pointed to a tiny sapphire point, the second world from the sun.
“That one —” The star dissolved through the edge of the display, the planet’s image grew, and the world’s parameters formed above it. “That one is habitable,” the pilot said.
“No doubt you’ll get a discovery bonus,” Radu said.
Vasili ignored the anger and sarcasm in Radu’s tone. “That wasn’t what I was thinking of,” he said mildly, “though for all of that you may be right.” After a long silence, he continued. “With some luck,” he said, “with as much luck as I have ever had at one time in my life, I’ll be able to get this ship home. We went in and out of transit so fast… I’ve looked for this star. The constellations aren’t mapped. We’re lost. When the ship dives I may be able to figure out where we are then. There are… landmarks? Anomalies and patterns. I can’t describe them to someone who hasn’t seen them. It’s hard enough to talk about them to someone who has seen them. Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I’m afraid to try to take you back in there. I’m afraid to try to take you home.”
Radu stared into the translucent image of the planet. “You could… leave me in the truck. I could wait. They’re always looking at new drugs, surely they have some in test that would work.” He looked at Vasili. “They’d send someone back for me — wouldn’t they?”
“I’ve never heard of this happening before — but I’m sure they would,” Vasili said quickly. “If they can, they will…”
“But —?”
“I could take us home fairly easily if I had this system’s coordinates. I don’t. The first time we surfaced out of transit the system was charted. Just barely, but I found it. The second time I had to extrapolate — and I had my fingers crossed I’d done it right. I don’t even know if I did or not, we fell out too fast for me to get my bearings. Now… I don’t know where we are. There’s so much interstellar dust, I can’t find any of the standard markers. I can’t match up any of the star patterns or pulsars or anything else. This isn’t an exploration ship, it isn’t prepared for involved analysis. Even with an x ship, it’s safest to go in small steps. We’ve taken a couple of very large ones.” He sounded more and more tense. “Exploration isn’t as easy as going down a path and then turning around and coming back. You can’t do that because when you turn around it doesn’t look the same. Do you see?”
“No.”
Vasili lifted his hands, then dropped them, his shoulders slumping. “It’s transit,” he said. “I can’t explain it. I shouldn’t even try.”
“No trail looks the same coming back, but you can still follow it. It’s harder work, but you can still swim up a river after you float down.”
“Not if there are rapids — that’s exactly it!” His expression brightened, then went grim again. “No, it isn’t. It isn’t anything like that. It’s…” He spread his hands helplessly.
“What you are telling me,” Radu said, “is that since you don’t know where we are, even if you succeed in returning to earth you may not be able to find your way back here.”
“I’ll take back all the normal space data. It should be possible to figure out where this place is.”
“But you can’t be sure of that.”
Vasili hesitated. “I’m afraid not,” he said reluctantly.
“I can stay behind in the truck and take the chance of dying of starvation or asphyxiation, or I can try to go home, and die in transit.”
“There’s a habitable planet —”
Radu glowered. “How stupid do you think I am? I’m a colonist! I’m not such a fool to expect to survive on a new world alone! Even if I could — why would I want to?”
“Are you such a fool to think you can survive transit?”
“I’d rather die quickly than slowly.” He spoke in anger, and only then realized he meant it.
“It isn’t that quick, as I understand it.”
“If I stay, what are the chances that someone will ever come back for me?”
Vasili looked at the deck. “Getting home — I can’t say. Maybe ten to one. Maybe a hundred. But the chances of finding my way back here, if the position can’t be charted… that’s nearly random.”
“Random!”
“I’m sorry. Transit —”
“Transit! Never mind. There is no chance at all. Nothing.”
“I’m sorry!” Vasili cried. “I don’t know what to tell you.” He turned away, and whispered, “Maybe this is what happens to all the ships that are lost. Maybe transit spits them out and never lets them back in.” He spoke like a hurt, abandoned child, and Radu saw that never getting home again was not what the pilot feared. His terror was the thought of never seeing transit again.
Radu reached out, but stopped before his hand brushed Vasili’s shoulder. “You are the best pilot I’ve ever heard of. Even Atna never saw one better, and he was in the crew since before there were any pilots. You can take this ship home.”
“What about you? Getting back here doesn’t depend on me,” Vasili said miserably. “Only on whether the system can be charted. What about you?”
When Radu joined the crew, he knew ships were sometimes lost. He knew people sometimes died in transit despite the drugs, and he knew that the drugs themselves could kill. Like everyone else, he had prepared himself for the, possibility that he might die. His only choice now was the time and place, and where he would be buried.
“I’ve written my letter,” he said. “There’s nothing I want to add to it.” He wanted to go home. He wanted his ashes to be taken back to Twilight.
Vasili nodded, without turning around.
“Then we will try… when you are ready.”
Radu gazed through the port at the crowded stars around them, at nothing. He wanted someone to be with him if he was going to die. He wanted someone to hold his hand, to embrace him, to comfort him. He leaned against the cool clear glass.
“Do you want me to stay here?” Vasili said.
Embarrassed by Vasili’s pity, and his own, Radu felt the blood rising to his face.
“I think it would be better if you didn’t,” he said. He wanted someone, but not a pilot — not this pilot.
“All right,” Vasili said. He had waited a decent interval to agree, but relief crept into his voice. Radu did not blame him for being glad to stay away. Radu did not want to see how an ordinary person died in transit either.
The pilot took his hand out of his pocket and awkwardly laid a vial on the table.
“They give us that,” he said reluctantly. “In case the ship gets lost and there’s no chance of getting home or anywhere. If it gets too bad for you —” He stopped.
Radu nodded. A quick and easy suicide sounded tempting just now. Perhaps the temptation would overcome him.
“Will I know? How long —”
Vasili laughed sharply.
In fury, his fists clenched, Radu took a quick step toward him. Vasili held up his hands in defense. But Radu had already stopped.
“I’m sorry,” Vasili said. “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s only that there’s no answer to your question. You can’t answer questions like that about transit.”
Radu found Vasili’s statement hard to believe; he thought it was just another way pilots had of keeping their secrets. But he would not beg for an answer.
“I won’t start until you tell me,” Vasili said.
“Just go on!” Radu yelled. “Hurry up! It’s bad enough without having to wait for it.” He clenched his hands around the rim of the port. After a moment, he heard the door close as the pilot went into the control room.
In the port, the bright unfamiliar constellations blurred and swam like the fish in the sea the last time Radu had pressed up against a thick glass wall. That time he knew he must part with Laenea. This time he did not know what would happen.
The ship vibrated against his fingers. He flattened his hands against the wall, feeling the power of the engines. Fascinated in spite of himself, he waited for whatever change would come. A drop of sweat trickled down the side of his face. He ducked his head to wipe it off on his sleeve. Unless he died instantly, he would at least have a few minutes to see what the mystery was about transit. Though he had wondered, he had never asked. It did not take much intuition or observation to discover that the pilots would not tell.
The vibration of the engines rose to a peak. Radu’s heart pounded. He cupped his hands around his face, shielding the port from the room’s glare. Nothing outside changed: The stars, of course, did not move. But slowly Radu did detect an alteration in the state of the universe outside. The great jeweled white mass of stars around him shifted, brightened, and intensified to brilliance so abruptly that Radu stepped back startled. He blinked, and the universe faded to gray.
Radu touched the glass with the tips of his fingers. It remained smooth and cool. But nothing lay beyond it, nothing at all. Radu strained his eyes for any hint of movement, any unusual scene, the embodiment of fantasies or nightmares, the perception of hidden truths. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his other senses, waiting for some revelation, or even for a warning of his own impending death.
But there was nothing.
Radu sat down again and waited. He looked at his hands, watching for the skin to age and wrinkle. But they remained the same, brown and square, peasant’s hands. Despite his name, if his family included high-bred nobility, it was many generations back. His fingernails were short and rough, and sometimes he bit them.
The vibration of the engines continued, smooth and steady, otherwise Radu felt no sensation of movement. He let himself feel his time sense, which had always expanded to include wherever he was at the moment. He had never paid much attention to the ability: It was a party trick, at most an anomalous and occasionally useful convenience. He could not teach anyone else to do it, nor could he explain it.
Relativity required that time, as Radu perceived it, pass at different rates in different places. He was used to that, and he was used to feeling the changes intensify whenever he was on an accelerating ship. Here, in transit, the underlying order had dissolved into chaos. Time passed in one place at one rate, in another at another, but when he thought about the first again the hierarchy had changed. How he perceived that there was a change, he did not know. It was like being in a dark room, surrounded by moving sculptures, able to look at each piece only for a moment as a single light rested on one, blinked off, and blinked on illuminating another in a random order, at dizzying speed.
He stopped trying to sort out his perceptions and waited quietly until he regained his equilibrium. Then he focused his attention on subjective time alone. To his surprise, it felt and behaved exactly as it would have if he had been in any other place. Pilots were said to experience a perturbation of their time sense in transit, but perhaps that was the result of the changes they submitted to in freeing themselves from the disparity between relativistic time in normal space, and the nonrelativistic universe of transit.
However ordinary transit felt to Radu, it was profoundly unknown, and he was in danger. He could do nothing; he could not even reassure himself. He could only wait, without knowing how long the wait would be.
So he waited, drenched in slow cold sweat, staring out the porthole at the infinite blank grayness. Once in a while he thought he saw a flash of color outside, but the flashes were always at the edge of his vision, and disappeared before he could look at them directly. He decided they must be his imagination.
Hugging his knees to his chest, he put his head down. Comforted by darkness, he waited.
o0o
Time passed. His mind counted it as hours, but tension made it feel like days. When he nearly dozed, he jerked awake, afraid. Why should he be afraid to sleep? He felt groggy, and the fragments of a dream swirled around him — he heard Laenea’s voice — and vanished. He shook his head, stood, and paced across the crew lounge and back again.
He went down the hall and flung open the door to the control room.
At the console, the pilot stared out the sweeping forward port. The sound of the door disturbed him, or he saw Radu’s reflection distorted in the glass. He spun toward him with a cry. Vasili Nikolaievich’s horror gradually changed to shock. After a moment he exhaled sharply, fumbled for his breathing mask, and fitted it over his mouth and nose. He drew in pure oxygen from the tank slung over his shoulder. When he took the mask away he had composed himself.
“Do you know where we are?” Radu asked. “Are we still lost?”
The pilot gazed at him; he blinked once, exhaled again, took another breath, and answered. The faint tremor in his voice betrayed his apparent calm.
“I know where we are,” he said. “I’ve found the way.”
“How much longer do we have to stay in transit?”
Vasili breathed deeply from his mask. “I tried to explain that the question isn’t answerable, we’ve got about the same distance still to go as we’ve already been, but that doesn’t mean the time will seem the same.” He spoke all in one breath, then put the mask back to his face. Breathing was the last normal rhythm pilots gave up in order to survive transit: They took irregular gulps of pure oxygen and exhaled only when the carbon dioxide level in their blood began to interfere with the exchange of oxygen.
“Something would have happened by now if it were going to, wouldn’t it?”
“I guess so,” the pilot said, “at least I think so, I’m sorry to keep saying this but I don’t know because we haven’t got any clear idea how things happen to normal people in transit.” He paused for breath. “The ones who were still alive couldn’t describe the sequences, and something that looks solid and sensible in transit will be something even a pilot can’t explain afterwards, you’ll see…” He ran out of breath and returned to his mask.
“I don’t feel any different,” Radu said, then realized what Vasili had been trying to avoid saying. “You mean there’s no way to tell if something will happen to me until we leave transit.”
The pilot kept the mask to his face much longer than necessary. Finally he took it away. He stretched his free hand toward Radu, as if in supplication. “I’m no expert, I haven’t studied what happened in the early days, besides, nothing happened to you the times you woke up.”
Radu slumped down in the other seat, resigned to more uncertainty. The pilot glanced briefly over the instruments and immediately returned his attention to the blank gray port. He breathed occasionally from the mask, but so seldom that he obviously did it only in response to real need.
Radu watched the digital numbers on the clock flick by, less evenly than the seconds ticked past in his mind. He tried to compare them for reference. After a while he shook his head in irritation. Something peculiar was going on, but he could not figure out what it was because he had forgotten what the clock had said when he first started watching it. That had nothing to do with the vagaries of transit: He was too distracted to be able to concentrate.
“Now that you’ve seen it,” Vasili said, “what do you think of it?”
“I beg your pardon? Think of what?”
“Transit!”
Radu frowned. “I think it’s excessively dull. But if you want to invent mysteries about it, I won’t tell the secret.”
The pilot’s expression was nearly as surprised as when Radu appeared awake and alive and unchanged.
“You mean you don’t see it — you don’t feel it?”
“See what? Feel what?”
The pilot flung out his arms, pointing to the viewport. “See that — and feel… its presence, all around you, palpable, it’s indescribable, it’s different for everyone.”
“But there’s nothing there,” Radu said.
Vasili Nikolaievich did not reply for a moment. Then, “What did you say?”
“There’s nothing there. A blank gray fog. No space, no stars. Just nothing.”
“You see nothing?”
“Are you trying to make a fool of me? Shall I put my fantasies up there for your entertainment?” Radu spoke in anger. His fantasies were too painful even for him.
“What are you?” the pilot whispered. “Are you some disguised machine, are you being tested, am I?”
“What?” Radu almost laughed, but the pilot was deadly serious, and frightened. “I’m a human being, just like you.” He stretched out his arm, and his sleeve hiked up above the bandage on his wrist. “Pilot, you’ve seen me bleed.”
The pilot shrugged. “Easy enough to counterfeit.”
“This is ridiculous,” Radu said. “Intelligent machines don’t function properly in transit. Everyone knows that.”
“Nor do ordinary human beings.”
“If they invented such a machine there’d be no reason to keep it secret.”
“Pilots would be obsolete — we may be anyway, because of you, no matter what you are, despite all the effort that’s gone into making us… acceptable.”
“This conversation makes no sense, pilot,” Radu said. He could think of no gentler way to put it. “If someone went to all the trouble of making a human machine this would be a purely idiotic way to test it. And if someone made a human machine they’d choose a better face than mine to put it behind.”
The pilot’s tension eased slightly. “That’s true,” he said with childlike cruelty, “that last, at least, is true, but machine or not, you’re immune to transit — you’re oblivious to it! — and whatever you are, you make pilots redundant.”
“I’m no pilot,” Radu said. “I haven’t the ability or the skills. And I haven’t the desire. I’m no threat to you.”
Facing the blank window, the pilot took a deep, slow breath. “Maybe you really believe that,” he said, his back to Radu so his voice sounded remote, “or wish you did, but you’re wrong.”
Radu folded his arms, glowering. “Or you could be wrong,” he said sarcastically. “I still could die.”
“No,” the pilot said softly, “it will be a long time before your bones go to dust, you’ll live… unless I kill you myself.”
Astonished, Radu made no response.
“Go away,” the pilot said, “please go away.”
Radu left the control room, though the tortured plea asked far more of him than that.