Following Oobla’s directions, he was soon in the funereal docking bay with its hushed lighting and somber furnishings. As before, it held a shuttle. And without prompting he climbed inside.
A Blurggit sat at the controls. Not Ugglub, though. He hadn’t seen his old companion since the meeting. “He hasn’t been here since the meeting,” said Oobla helpfully.
Marshall started. He had assumed he could have a private reflection.
“And why would you assume that?” said Oobla. “How can we share in your brave reactions, your brilliant strategizing, your uncanny leaps of intuition, if we don’t listen in?”
“We? You mean you’re all in here with me?”
“We are,” she said. “But don’t concern yourself. We’re not going to fill your head with distracting chatter. We had a discussion about it and decided you would only be hearing from me. Which makes sense, doesn’t it? You seemed quite comfortable with me, back on the Day of Delight.”
And he had to confess, he still felt comfortable with her. She seemed so caring, so maternal, he couldn’t believe she would make him confront anything too awful.
He stopped thinking and waited.
Silence.
So he repeated the thought, with greater emphasis. “I can’t believe you would make me confront anything too awful.”
But again his brain seemed empty of anyone except himself.
“Oobla? Are you still there?”
“I am,” she said. And now the shuttle was vibrating, as before it two sections of hull began to separate.
“Let me put it another way,” he thought. “I noticed you said I would be facing nearly impossible odds. Should I take something from that?”
“As you wish, dear.”
“No, really,” he persisted. “Just how impossible will these odds be?”
A few quiet moments passed. Then, “Marshall, I do not believe you attended previously, when I tried to convey the effort we went to on your behalf.”
“Oh, but I did, Oobla. I did.”
She continued. “In case it didn’t sink in, we spent weeks swimming through the data those Zetans collected about you.”
“Oh, but you were clear about that, Oobla. Quite.”
“And we needed weeks,” she continued. “You cannot fathom how much they amassed, merely by burrowing into your planet’s computers. Plus, they had a cube following you, identical to the one that’s observing you now.”
Marshall looked up, observed the cube and wondered how he could have failed to notice such a thing in a small basement apartment.
“Easily,” said Oobla. “It was cloaked. Like everything the Zetans don't want humans to see. But that’s not the point. The point is that we filtered an ocean of information—absorbed it, digested it. And you imagine we did all that just to put you in a hopeless situation, knowing its outcome from the start?”
“Of course not!” said Marshall hopefully.
“Of course not,” said Oobla. “How absurd do you think we are?”
Try as he might, he could not suppress a couple of memories from the spawning pool, which bubbled unbidden to mind.
“I see,” she said, after a further pause. “Well, let me simply inform you, then, that the probability of your succeeding at the task we have devised for you, calculated to the ninth digit, is the same as the probability that you would escape your planet and roam the Galaxy, back when you were living in that grotto and issuing announcements on that communications channel.
“You have declared yourself able to perform such feats at will, have you not?” she added.
And Marshall had to acknowledge that, yes, he might have made some claim like that, though he also hoped she understood the term, “figure of speech.”
But he got no further, his mental companion having collided with the limit of her tolerance.
“Do you realize the chance we’re taking?” she raged at him. “Have you considered for one moment how much older we’ll be if you don’t justify our faith in you?”
“OK, OK, I’ll justify it. But please, what am I up against? What have you arranged?”
She didn’t answer, and her silence told him that if he was to get even a hint of what lay ahead, he would have to get it himself.
So he tried to, by keeping careful watch on the windows that surrounded him.
The one to his right, for instance, through which he could see the planet Blurgg, watery and vast. And the one—
Though that was odd. Wasn't he several minutes into the trip already? So shouldn't Blurgg have been long gone by now?
And shouldn’t the thanatosphere? But there it was, through the window behind him, still only a city block or two away.
Meaning that, at best, he was moving at walking speed—decidedly not a practical means of going anywhere in outer space.
But before he could wonder much about that, he was facing a third mystery, this one on his left. For there, about a hundred times the size of the shuttle, floated a mass of objects glommed together. These included a squarish mid-part, two stubby winglike protuberances on either side of it, and a neck leading to a kind of wedge in front. Though that was an incomplete description, since the mid-part was somewhat squashed, one of the wings barely attached and the whole hodgepodge covered in angry black smears.
But what struck him most about this ship (since he was pretty sure that’s what it was, or at least had been), was the idea it put in his head. For he couldn't help thinking it had been demolished intentionally.
Was Ugglub’s scheme not original, then? Were the partyers in their thanatospheres constantly being interrupted by sex-starved spacefarers who trashed their own vessels in the hope of gaining admittance?
He found the notion irresistibly amusing.
While the shuttle, describing a long, leisurely arc, came to rest against the wreck.
Then came the sounds of hissing air and sliding metal, as the hatch behind him opened into a dim and grimy interior.
“Hey, wait a minute!”
“Aren’t you excited?” said Oobla in an excited way. “Back in your grotto you loved that ridiculous entertainment in which semis rush around the Galaxy, imposing their standards on everyone. And you wished to have adventures like theirs. And now, thanks to us, you have what you wished for. Not only a vehicle to have adventures in, but a duplicate of the one in that entertainment.”
“The Enterprise?” he cried, as the pilot helped him off the shuttle. “You think this resembles the Starship Enterprise?”
“As much as any real starship could,” said Oobla. “It has the two side things and the front thing and the central connecting thing that you’re in now. And what’s more, it has a place in history. Craft like this traversed the Galaxy, Marshall, back when I was a hatchling.”
“But that was over six hundred years ago!”
“And the universe is billions of years old,” she answered, making a point he couldn’t quite follow. “Well, never mind. It's yours, and your work lies ahead of you.”
“My work? I wouldn’t know how to fix this. I wouldn’t know where to—”
“Fix it?” she said. “Why would you want to fix it? Do you imagine we'd have bought it for you if it weren’t operational?”
“You bought it?” He stared about, at a badly canting wall and crumpled ceiling, and tried to subdue the opinion he was forming of Blurggit judgment. “Well, I’m sure you got an excellent deal,” he said finally. “But what am I to do?”
“That’s not for me to say, really,” she said. “This is, after all, your challenge. But if I were to offer a hint, just this once, it would be to acquaint yourself with your equipment.”