Punctuation lessons always gleefully accepted! Somebody once said that if they'd wanted to learn all those particle names, they'd have become a botanist, which is how I feel about commas, periods, schwas, etc. Anyway,thanks as ever to Tikatu, Darkhelmet, Agent Five, Barb and Varda's Servant for their kind reviews. It's nice to hear these things, and hey, I'm having fun...
49
Endurance; in the galley (that miracle of modern engineering)-
...Well, there was always the 'Edible Tissue Culture Project', or ETCuP, though no one aboard had been desperate enough to try it. Yet.
After deliberating for a bit, John reasoned that the whole-wheat noodles might be smashed into small enough pieces to be boiled along with the rice... and that the beef chunks, when removed from their vacuum-sealed plastic envelope, rehydrated, and allowed to swell to normal size, would generate a slurry of ketchup-spiked gravy that could then be dumped atop the rice mixture... But, of vegetables, they had nothing else at all.
Roger had used the very last quarter-teaspoon of dehydrated onion flakes the night before, spiking his 'Curried Mashed Protein Crackers in Seasoned Sauce' (an old family recipe, he'd assured them all). Salt, too, was running low, and pepper the stuff of fond memory. Nothing tasted right, even with spices, but there wasn't enough to go around, regardless.
Shrugging, John set the rice and crushed pasta in the microwave with a few cups of recycled water (best not dwelt on), and punched in a cook time at random. Not exactly like running the Texas Super Collider, whose operating parameters he understood to a much higher level of precision. After all, the only thing he'd had to do there was produce Higgs Bosons, not dinner... Kyrano, he decided glumly, was a goddam savant.
Now for the (sort of) meat, which seemed far from 'go for launch' (except out the window, maybe). The 'use-by' date, he couldn't help noticing, had been marked over in heavy black ink. For all he knew, the package originated from the Gemini program, or World War II.
There was something shining at the back of his mind. An elegant, 4D equation in beautiful, unfamiliar symbols. It fairly sang for his full attention, but John had work to do, first. This was no time for parity errors.
Bolted beneath the narrow aluminum counter was a sort of giant 'letter opener', used to slit heavy plastic food packages. John used it now to cut his way through the cammo-green beef envelope, which made a noise like an Egyptian tomb being opened for the first time in 3,000 years, and emitted the smell of elderly dog food. Mentally washing his hands of the whole, sorry business, John used a hard plastic kitchen utensil to pry the mummified beef from its unquiet grave.
Into another bowl it went, to be decently re-buried under a blanket of ketchup, nature's perfect food. He stared at the glutinous mess, then added a bit of water, thinking,
'What the hell... it can't get any worse.'
In his mind, the lovely equation pushed closer to the surface, becoming clearer by the moment. Temporarily transfixed, John mentally rotated it, watching what happened to reality as he did so.
Reality! Ominous popping noises from the microwave interrupted his reverie. Rice wasn't supposed to explode, was it? Lunging across the narrow, roughly cylindrical galley, John cut off the microwave with a hasty slap, and yanked open the door. Steam belched forth, while something hissed and spattered within. Fetching a thermal mitt, he removed the bowl and regarded its crusted contents. Well... it was certainly 'al dente'.
The first few days aboard Thunderbird 5, he'd actually tried to cook. The resultant, inedible disasters had more than convinced John Tracy that snack food and frozen dinners were all that stood between him and starvation. Here, though, he was expected to pull his weight, even if he routinely pulled it straight into the garbage chute.
With touching innocence, John added more water, thinking that the rock-hard substance in the Pyrex bowl might yet return to life.The rice and pasta crust were set down upon the counter beside the rapidly swelling mass of hydrating beef. The smell was indescribable, and better left so. It was at that precise point that John began seriously considering the Edible Tissue Culture.
Covering both bowls, he pushed the equation back down again, and proceeded aft, to the ship's experimental work area (the science lab, they usually called it). There, amid elementary school space projects, the fish tanks, rat cage and work benches, was a chromed incubation cabinet, about the size of a dormitory refrigerator.
John went over and opened its door, revealing there a sort of big petri plate, with nutrient and waste flow hoses, electrical wiring, oxygen tubes and a growth monitor. All of this technology supported a two-inch thick mass of pinkish, lab-cultured 'meat'. According to the technical specs, you were supposed to just slice a piece off and allow the rest to regenerate.
John gazed at the shiny lump for a long moment, thought of Scott's campfire horror stories about 'The Chicken Heart', and shut the door. Not just that the mess inside looked even more disgusting than his beefy-noodle surprise (shock, rather), but he really wasn't sure he wanted to make the thing mad. In the movies, vengeful tissue cultures had a way of getting even. Of course, so did computers, which put him to mind of Five, again.
His worry for the wounded quantum entity, never deeply buried, surfaced again. In the long hours since he'd unleashed a virus to beat back whatever had attempted to seize Five, she'd done nothing more than slightly warm the ID chip at his left wrist. Otherwise, no word. Nor had he been able to contact Hackenbacker through the entangled photon comm system she operated. In effect, his computer seemed to be in something very close to a near-death coma, and he had no clear idea how to help her.
Leaving the lab, John started forward again, pausing to look out of the exercise area port hole. He had to focus past his own gaunt reflection, not that there was much else to see. It was still dark outside, pitch black beyond the harsh yellow gleam of Endurance's flood lights. The rusty dunes and wind-scoured rocks around the ship seemed bleached and pale, the twisted hulk of a ruined probe somehow as lonely and pathetic as a field of horns and frozen muzzles sticking out of a deep, fence-line snow drift back in Wyoming; a sight he'd never forgotten.
Further out, hidden by darkness, lay the supply cache they had to reach, if they hoped to survive. All levity aside, their food was nearly gone, and unlike the crew of the original Endurance, they could not fall back on penguins and seals. There wasn't anything here to kill and eat.
The Ares III crew faced a simple, stark choice; reach the supply cylinders, starve to death, or place themselves in suspended animation and hope that rescue arrived before the ship's power failed. Pete, Linda and Cho would have a decent chance, he thought. Roger was iffy... And John, himself, doomed. He would not survive another dose of cryoprotectant, which for him would amount to death by lethal injection.
Folding his arms upon the porthole's projecting 'sill', John rested his chin on his forearms and gazed out at the cold, windy little world beyond the steel-glass panel. All of a sudden wondering where Earth was, he closed his eyes to summon up a 3-D mental map of the solar system (sort of 'you are here'). Time, speed and distance...
At their current point in time, with Mars in this orientation relative to the sun... Earth would be further in, scooting along her smaller orbit... there. (Plenty of launch window, still, for Kuiper. Day and a half, at least.)
He sawthe worldin his mind's eye, blue and warm and wet, wistfully improbable, and almost impossibly far away. Opening his eyes again, John gazed in the right direction and said, very quietly,
"Sorry about that, Scott. I didn't mean it. I really would be glad to see you, if you came out this way, but it's dangerous here, and I'd rather not put you guys at risk. Tell you all about it over a few beers, when I get home. Promise."
...But dinner wasn't preparing itself. Reluctantly, John straightened, turning away from the window. The supply run lay before them, tomorrow; desicated beef and crunchy rice, tonight.
Lab 4, Tracy Island-
Brains made ready to trigger his newest device. He stood in one of the larger, chrome and concrete physics labs, not far from his prototype 'time machine'. The room was triple blast-shielded, and nearly featurelessbut for a glass-fronted equipment cabinet, an aluminum table, and some arcane hardware that ought (in theory, at least) to open up a very small 'hole'.
One of Hackenbacker's key early discoveries had been that, along a nearby parallel plane, there lay a tiny universe still in the earliest throes of its own 'big bang'very close in actual space, but with an enormous time differential. This incredibly dense, super-heated quantum packet of a dimension could be readily mined for its energy... if you had the technology to do so. Which, needless to say, he did. Alone among mankind's physicists and thinkers, Dr. Hackenbacker had the rampaging power of an entire baby universe at his fingertips (a fact known only to John, 'Fermat', and Jeff Tracy).
The skinny, dark-haired engineer pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose and set to work, barely noticing when Scott Tracy strode into the lab, a small dog playing and yipping about his heels. Brains had donned goggles, and set up a sort of null-energy shield about himself. Now, he connected his machinery to its other-dimensional power source, and hit the on-button.
If it worked, he could connect the spot six inches before him to the far side of the lab (about thirty yards away), through a tiny, stable worm hole.
Whining to life, the machine converted its sudden torrent of energy to mass, temporarily creating something denser than Jupiter and Saturn combined, that was nevertheless smaller than a child's glass marble. Almost instantaneously, the super-bright mass ripped a hole, opening two windows. For a moment, Brains saw directly before him a section of aluminum table, with his 'E equalsMC2' coffee mug on it, close enough to pick up and take a drink from.
Then, something terrible happened. Many somethings. The dog howled, Scott shouted unintelligibly, the glass cabinet-front and coffee mug shattered, and the room itself seemed to bend upward at a sharp right angle. Alarms shrilled, then abruptly cut off, their wiring snapped short as if by sharpened pliers.
Horrified, Brains flipped a row of switches, in effect pulling the machine's plug. The coruscating mass winked out, the wormhole zipped shut, and the room about him unfolded, leaving behind a buckled floor, splintered glass, and badly injured bystanders.
Scott had dropped to his knees, coughing blood, while the spotted dog huddled against him and whimpered. Hackenbacker ripped off the goggles and ran to the pilot's side. Noting an almost spectral pallor, ragged breathing and abdominal swelling, Brains diagnosed serious internal damage... To the animal, as well, probably...
A tremor set up, rocking the very island, then grumbled slowly away before it could shake itself into a full-fledged earthquake. A bloodied Alan Tracy burst into the lab moments later, trailed at a slight distance by Virgil and Jeff.
"Dude! What're you...?"
"M - merely an experiment," Hackenbacker muttered. "It didn't, ah... didn't quite w- work as, ah... as anticipated."
"No doubt, Einstein!" Alan yelled back, "Mom's arm is, like, broken, and stuff!"
"I'm truly s- sorry," Brains began, as Virgil and Jeff helped him get Scott off the cracked and tilted floor. Calming himself somewhat, Alan picked up the dog, who licked his face gratefully.
"Brains," Jeff cut in, trying to ignore his own cracked ribs, "what the hell happened h..."
Then the nearest wall comm flashed to sparkinglife, revealing TinTin's pale, bruised face.
"Mr. Tracy," she said, "there are reports of minor earthquakes and tidal surges in a line extending from this island... and a cargo plane has had its wings sheared off, and been forced to ditch in the ocean, about ninety-two miles away, Sir."
"Oh, my God...!" Virgil glanced down at Scott, obviously in no shape for anything but emergency surgery. Dad looked pretty rough, as well. John was gone, Gordon too far away to help rescue those people from the disasterIR hadsomehow caused.
"Alan, TinTin, d'you think you're up to..."
His youngest brother nodded eagerly.
"For sure, Virgil! We can handle pulling a couple of pilots out of the water. Right, T?"
TinTin agreed, her voice calm, but her face shining.
"C'est vrai, Alain. Virgil, I am glad to help, in any way needed."
Said Jeff, wincing as Scott's weight dragged at his wounded side,
"I'll fly the desk. Be careful, you three; God knows what else has happened."