The fifteen-minute wait had been ugly and quite ungodly. But there I was strapped in again, last seat on the left of the five hundred twenty-second row waiting to enter Earth’s atmosphere.
EOS-7 had been crowded. Too crowded. And there had been endless lines everywhere.
I felt the first ripples and braced for reentry. Descending into Earth’s atmosphere was akin to riding a stellar wave until it slammed into the face of the moon. Quick, short, bumpy, and sometimes deadly.
A few seconds passed. Things started to smooth out. I cursed myself for paying ten thousand credits for the hundred-million-credit aborted-entry insurance. Then without warning, the shuttle lurched to a halt.
Naturally, I filed out of the shuttle and eventually filtered into the line with everyone else waiting for the three-minute fifteen-second shuttle to New L.A. In the crowd were Margaret, her female companion and the pencil-necked man with the vacuum bag. Margaret’s lady friend was still cooing in her ear.
“There, there Margaret,” she was still saying.
Margaret was sobbing and blowing her nose into a saturated handkerchief.
Recalling the papers in my pocket, the spilled vacuum bag and how I felt about poor Margaret, I made a dash for her. But she was soon lost in the insidious crowd.
I continued the search for a moment — only a moment. I had but one minute to be strapped in on the three-minute fifteen-second shuttle to New L.A. I didn’t find her, so I turned and dashed back to the departure bay. The hold line had shifted and I had to conduct a limited assault campaign to get my place back.
A siren sounded. A lull swept through the crowd. The mechanical service voice called out, “The three-minute fifteen-second shuttle to New L.A. has been delayed by two minutes forty-five seconds.”
A murmur erupted from the crowd. I shrank against the wall, held onto my briefcase with a death grip. In an instant, this would get ugly. The last time this had happened they had to cordon off three departure bays and airport security in full riot gear had to be called in.
“I have deadlines to meet!” shouted one man.
Another screamed, “I want my money back!”
Several others carried on his chant.
Far behind me and to the right, I heard a woman crying. I had nothing to lose now. I peered through the stirring mob. It was Margaret, poor, sad Margaret. The announcement must’ve been too much for her. I could see her female companion cooing into her ear. The man with his vacuum bag sat still, slumped over onto his haunches with his face buried in his hands. Poor, sad Margaret.
I recalled the papers in my pocket. Surely the papers would cheer her up. Ninety-eight seconds remained in the delay, so I made a heroic dash.
The crowd growing irate, didn’t bend. I had to fight my way through, wielding my briefcase before me. I had played full contact hyberball more than a few times, but things here were different. These guys really wanted to hurt me. I managed, barely, to weave my way through to Margaret.
I unfolded the small stack of papers nicely, taking out the creases the way a gentleman would. I handed the papers to Margaret, only then glancing at the imprinted words. The first page of a technical manuscript stared back at me. It was entitled:
Space Colonization is Dead
And underneath the manuscript header and title were these words:
Written by
Dr. Martin Schwenne
&
Dr. Ishad Ballin
I paused briefly to look at the gentleman whose face was still buried in his hands. I wanted to say something, though I didn’t know what. Poor, sad Margaret, someone had to brighten her day.
“Things will turn out all right, they always do,” I said, smiling though I didn’t believe it.
Margaret’s sobs intensified. I turned away. The delay was over. The angry mob became a crowd. I was nearly late for the three-minute fifteen-second shuttle to New L.A. Halfway to the shuttle doors, I realized something. It struck me like a ball of red lightning and my legs froze. Dr. Ishad Ballin had been in the Space Pro Labs auditorium — the one person I idolized was working with Dr. Martin Schwenne. Then I realized something else.
I looked back over my shoulder, but Margaret, her female companion and the illustrious Martin Schwenne, were gone. I stood there for what seemed the longest time. Minutes may have passed; I’m not quite sure. Then I hurried off.
I missed the three-minute fifteen-second shuttle to New L.A. — not because I couldn’t have made it. The stewardess had already taken my boarding pass. The countdown timer had been ticking away. The departure bay doors were closing as I looked on. I was one step away, but I didn’t move. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to hurry off. I had done what I had set out to do, what I had been hired to do, for you see, that is what I do.
My hands trembling just as violently as Martin Schwenne’s hands had been trembling hours earlier, I unclasped my briefcase. I emptied its contents, including the imagcam, into the nearest refuse receptacle. No immediate second thoughts, I strode off.
Then I got to thinking. I never should have accepted payment from Galactic Project IV on such an issue yet could I let forty million credits slip away? The answer was right there before me. No, I couldn’t.
I hurried back to the receptacle.
I reached my hand into the trash and groped around. But it wasn’t there. I screamed, “Dear God, it’s gone, it’s gone,” then proceeded to tear the receptacle off the wall. Trash sprayed into the corridor. On hands and knees, I groped my way through it. But there was no imagcam. And forty million credits slipped away in an instant because I was going soft. Soft, could you imagine? Me, soft.
I searched through that trash until EOS-7 Security carried me away. I never found the imagcam. I never received the final installment.
* * *
“Mr. Steelbridge, you’ve told that story the same way every time, except this last time. What did you change this last time? What is it that you no longer wish to tell us?” The man sucked in a breath ominously. “What if I told you we recovered something of yours from the EOS-7 disposers, what then? I’ll ask one last time, what happened to the imagcam?”
I offered an ugly smile. “I gave it to Margaret.”
“And Dr. Schwenne?”
“No.”
“What do you mean by that? And I’ll thank you to wipe that smile off your face.” The man waited for my expression to change, but it didn’t. Then he repeated, “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, no. No is what I mean.”
The man’s spidery arm reached out for my shirt and wrenched me across the table.
I maintained my grin. They would kill me, but I had already won. Margaret was safe by now and Martin’s dangerous thoughts were lost in corners of my mind that could never be freed. Then I said the words I had been waiting to say. “The future of space colonization is hardly dead, my dear man. It is dawning…”
The man bunched his eyebrows together.
“And you see, nothing you do to me matters. I’ve paid my debt. And even if you did recover the imagcam, I erased the parts worth your while and destroyed every digital record of Martin’s ideas that ever existed outside of his mind.”
I pried the man’s hand from my shirt and shuttled across the table to my seat. The man followed, a syringe in his hand.
Momentarily, I paraded my dignity while I waited for the end. Then I said proudly the last words I’d ever speak. “You see, Martin really did perfect cryoterraform and the cryodrive… It is only a matter of time now.”
As the world faded to black, I heard Martin say in the back of my mind, “Instead of looking to go faster, we should have been looking to go slower, the final absolute, where matter is at once infinitely still and infinitely fast. The final absolute where matter becomes something new — something that will change space and become at once, the key and the coffer.”