aaron_the fall of america_chapter_13

Chapter 13

In my dream, there was a little boy who thought there was a good hiding place in the underground mall. His mother, not understanding why anyone needed to hide, was trying to get her son to move along. He wasn't convinced of the safety. He was also fascinated with the spacious design of the building.

As I rode by him on my childhood bicycle, I whispered to him that he better hide. I knew there was trouble following me. He would be safer if he hid.

At another point in the dream, I was riding my bicycle along a city street when I noticed a strange mixture of people playing a simile to baseball. Just as I stopped to watch, one man executed an excellent hit. The next batter was a huge woman. She had to hit a piece of raw meat. Each time she made a hit, the meat failed to pass the foul line. She finally made a fair hit and so did the two girls after her. The next girl had to hit a cassette tape.

When I left, I had trouble keeping things in my pocket.

My back is tired from all the digging I've been doing. After digging like a mutant mole this morning, I passed out from fatigue. I couldn't have moved even if I was pursued by a hungry, large-jawed predator. I felt elated when I awoke but soon had to sleep again. I spend much more time sleeping than being awake. I need to be more interested in my immediate future.

I can remember a few things about my return to the familiar, four-dimensional space-time. It was a great distance, compared to crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a Leer jet, to the nearest star with planets. At sixty-percent light speed, it took six Earth days to reach the solar system. Most of the time was spent in simi-frozen sleep.

The star's mass was more than ten times that of our sun. Unless I missed something on the outer limits, thirty two planets and a huge asteroid belt revolved around the star. From my calculation of the stars mass and the planets distance from it, there were two or three planets capable of supporting life as I understand life: the sixth, the seventh and the eighth. The sixth appeared barren, the eight looked like it might have had a civilisation if I used my imagination but there was no apparent life. The seventh and eighth planets had a relatively short distance between orbital, not much farther than the moon is from the Earth. Maybe twice as far. About every three thousand five hundred Earth days, the planets would be at their closest, perpendicular to the star. If nothing else, the seventh planet, which had a high percentage of water cover, would experience large tides every ten Earth years. The more I thought about it the more I hypothesised about the wars or parties or religious festivals every ten years. If there had been life on the other planet, they may have had the chance to communicate or kill each other. There was nothing to indicate there ever was intelligent life to perform my fantasies.

The seventh planet, although it seemed very still, looked like it might have life. It was not possible to guess about civilisation but the atmosphere was similar to my home planet and the water was close to the same blue and the land had a fair amount of that most hopeful colour, green. The gravity was stronger than Earth's and the environmental conditions were those sought for on tropic holidays. I'm certain I considered everything before I decided to land in a small clearing on the side of a gentle hill.

The planet had only one continent; it circled most of the equator. The rest of the planet was water with no polar ice caps. I had the impression that the planet was older than Earth but this might have been because there were no continental plates smashing into each other, making mountains. There appeared to be one large, yet gentle, mountain range covering the central area. Something about it was a little unnatural.

Jumping through space-time blind is a risky endeavour. With no previous knowledge, there is no way to predict where the craft would reappear. With the new information in the computer, the jump back will not be too difficult to calculate. I'll have to interpret what happened before I can make the jump back to the general area of Earth. That could take days of study, even longer if I don't get started.

It is a convenience that there is much more space than there is stars, planets, black holes, novas and other forms of matter, antimatter and energy. Even a blind jump has high odds of safe re-entry, assuming re-entry is a given. If I had popped back in, in the middle of some matter, my survival would be unlikely. But I wonder if it is even possible to re-enter into matter. Possibly, it's impossible and entry back into space-time would be suspended until the next possible space.

I'll leave that to the technicians to decide when I bring them back the results of the experiment. Only my present predicament deserves my attention. And my problem involves only dirt. And a wall that might be mine.

I think about Richard and what he might do if he was in his own situation. I wonder what he and Ashley are doing after these four years. Their four years and my couple weeks. It seems so illogical to lose so much time.

They have no certainty when I'll be back. They have calculated anywhere between four years to several thousand years per jump, with no understanding of hyper-space. Calculating things no one knows about amounts to purely speculative solutions. There are only possibilities and when stretched to the limit, probabilities. It's possible that I return to Earth twenty thousand years later. It would be funny to return thirty minutes sooner than when I left. Coming and going at the same time.

I should find my spaceship.



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by Joanne B. Washington

© 2001 | the jose wombat project