Wake-up Call

Don West was sweating, something he had not done for many years while in suspension. At the moment, it was not knowing exactly how many years that had been supspended that had West's adrenaline pumping. His unconscious mind was automatically processing the information faster than his still-sluggish conscious mind could absorb it. His body was telling him he was in great danger, but West couldn't gather his wits quickly enough to assess the situation. Worse yet, the slumbers were calling him back into the darkness. West felt as though he was falling asleep at the wheel of his speeding 'Vette, on some lonely strip of highway in the backwoods of Florida. The last thing he remembered was glancing at the chronometer, which read 08:17. And then everything was dark.

The Jupiter 2's clock read 14:22 when West next saw it.

"Wow," he thought, "Just over six hours."

The realization that he had successfully performed a simple mathematical calculation was followed quickly by the fact that he had not driven off the road into some interstellar ditch. The old J2 was still cruising along, doing its thing, without benefit or need of its addle-brained pilot.

"Well, not quite so addle-brained," West thought. "At least I can still tell time, assuming it's the same day I fell asleep on."

West resolved to figure out, once and for all, just exactly what day it was. Scanning the chronometer readout with his one clear eye, West caught his breath as the square-ish gray blobs slowly resolved into digits:

04/19/2079

"2079! That's IMPOSSIBLE!" West's mouth moved clumsily, involuntarily, as he tried to give voice to the thought that overwhelmed him. The best he could manage was a coarse, garbled groan.

Don West was not a man given to fits of panic. Years of pilot training had taught him to temper his emotions and to evaluate the situation calmly, coolly and quickly, but this day his mind could not grasp the possibilities.

Squinting with both eyes, West studied the chronometer in his helmet display again, certain that he had simply misread the numbers, but it was not to be. Try as he might, West couldn't will the digits into any other configuration. The Jupiter 2 had launched in October of 2047 on a seven-year outward bound flight to the binary star system of Alpha and Beta Centauri. The ship's elaborate version of an alarm clock had been set for September, 2054. If the numbers before him were accurate, Major West and the Robinsons had overslept by nearly twenty-five years!

Runnin' on empty

Major Don West could feel his heart pounding in his chest as he forced his brain to make the necessary connections, the necessary calculations.

"Where have we been for the past twenty-five years?" He thought. "Or the past thirty-two years, for that matter? That's a long time to be cruising along at close to the speed of light."

West was further perplexed. "Why didn't the Robot initiate the reanimation sequence when the ship neared the Alpha Centauri system?"

According to the mission profile, the Jupiter 2's environmental control robot was to monitor the ship's systems as it cruised silently toward its destination. If all conditions were nominal at the end of the ride, the Robot would trigger the reanimation process for Dr. Robinson a few weeks prior to arrival in the Alpha Centauri solar system. Robinson would then reanimate the Major in plenty of time for him to earn his flight pay by bringing the J2 into orbit around Alpha Prime, an Earth-sized planet known to have a breathable atmosphere and liquid water.

Alpha Prime inhabited that most sought after slice of celestial real estate; not too close to its parent star and not too far away. This habitable zone was naturally dubbed by astronomers as the "Goldilocks Zone." Not too hot. Not too cold. It was just right. Of the hundreds of thousands of extra-solar planets discovered since the mid-1990s, only a small fraction met the magic triad of size, climate and water that would be required to support a successful human colony. Not only did Alpha Prime meet all of the pre-reqs, it was also in Earth's own back yard, a mere four light-years away.

Astronomers had known about Alpha Prime since the early 2020s thanks in large part to an array of highly sensitive space-based telescopes launched by Alpha Control a few years earlier. Everyone knew where Alpha Prime was located, and there was a lot of encouraging data being returned by the AC telescopes, but you can only glean so much from long-range observations. In the 2030s, Alpha Control scientists created the first disruptor field, allowing humans to be successfully, if not comfortably, suspended for years on end. It was a discovery that would remove, or at least significantly mitigate, the greatest barrier to interstellar travel: the great distances involved.

Alpha Control had only been in the space exploration business for a couple of decades when the decision was made to construct the Jupiter series of interstellar spacecraft. AC's greatest innovation had been in bringing the costs of spaceflight down by several magnitudes of order. While the cost of putting a pound of anything into orbit had hovered around $10,000 dollars for the first sixty years of the Space Age, Alpha Control realized that most of those costs were man-made and arbitrary. By turning its vast aerospace and manufacturing industries loose on the problem, Alpha Control was able to bring the price-per-pound into the hundreds of dollars. Space flight still wasn't as cheap as taking the bus, but it was no longer at the mercy of fickle government bureaucrats.

But Wait... There's More!

The sick feeling in Don West's stomach was giving way to a mixture of frustration and anger. West knew he was in a tough spot but until he got more information about the situation he was helpless to do much about it. Like every nuclear powered submarine, aircraft carrier and spacecraft for the past century, the Jupiter 2 relied on a supply of radioactive fuel to generate electricity for the ship. That electricity powered the J2's three-tiered propulsion systems as well as the ghostly blue force-field that surrounded the ship in flight, which was essential for deflecting cosmic rays, dust motes and micrometeorites. It maintained the all-important disruptor fields as well as all of the navigation and life-support systems. While nuclear subs and carriers could operate for years on a few pounds of fuel, eventually power levels ran low and they had to return to port to refuel. Unless the Jupiter was coming up on Earth or Alpha Prime in the next few weeks there wouldn't be enough power to maintain the ship's vital systems, and there were no filling stations in space.

Another sobering thought occurred to Major West. His original mission was to ride shotgun for seven years, deliver the Robinson party safely to Alpha Prime, spend a year on the ground helping them establish a home base on the planet and then fly back to Earth in triumphant glory aboard a Jupiter 2 crammed with scientific samples and specimens. The payoff would be enormous and West could write his own ticket for the rest of his life. He'd be a modern-day Lindbergh.

His round-trip would take about fifteen years by the ship's chronometer, though for people back home it would seem more like twenty-two years due to the time dilation attributed to near-light travel. Thanks to the electronic marvels of suspended animation, West would only age physically a couple of years on the trip and most of his family and friends would still be around to welcome him home. Even without time dilation, though, it seemed unlikely that his Dad would still be alive 32 years after the launch. With dilation, it was unlikely that anyone he ever knew on Earth would still be alive by the time he got back, except for those who had been infants or children when he left.

Suddenly the Major was feeling like a very lonely man.

West realized that he had much bigger problems at hand and decided he could postpone feeling sorry for himself until a more opportune moment. The nuclear core power level alarms weren't the only red lights in his heads-up display. Three of the Jupiter's eight inertial guidance gyroscopes were completely off-line and a fourth was definitely wonky. The J2's central astrogator could maintain the ship's stability on as few as three gyros, but all of them had been spinning for more than twice their designed life spans.

"Oh well," thought West, "With any luck we'll run out of gas long before the gyros fail." It was a dark joke, but it was precisely the kind of gallows humor that a veteran flier could appreciate. For the first time in decades, Don West cracked a grin. It hurt.

Another alarm light indicated that the upper deck of the J2 had failed to re-pressurize, which ought to have happened as soon as he entered the first reanimation cycle. Normally, the ship's internal atmosphere would be pumped into storage tanks a few hours into the flight to reduce the corrosive effects of oxygen on the electronics and other structures. All of the crew were wearing pressure suits, so the danger was minimal, and West suspected a sticky valve somewhere, but it was just one more problem that he didn't need at the moment.

Fortunately, more of the ship's systems appeared to be operating properly than not, and West could sense the Sandman calling his name once more. A quick scan showed that all of the crew cryo-tubes were functioning nominally, including one of the two empty back-up tubes housed on the lower deck. "Odd, that." West thought before drifting back to sleep. No doubt another malfunction due to the Jupiter's advanced age.