BACK    ABOUT    REVIEWS   

Page 41.

The boat ran slowly aground, bow first, a bit sideways, and sat firmly on the metallic ledge. The boat had bent a handrail down and now hung frozen on that ledge, looking across a wide walk space toward a series of doors and shop windows. “Like a huge mall,” Alex said.

“A shopping mall,” Maryan said wonderingly, from some ancient memory of her Shurey ancestor.

Alex noticed that it was getting hot in the boat, and the air seemed to be leaden. He touched his throat, which was slick with sweat. “Oxygen is running low.”

“Maybe it only did a quick replenish in the atmosphere,” she said, “and there is little or no backup in its tanks.”

“We’ll suffocate.” He walked in a panic up to the opposite screen and banged on it with both fists. “Spector!” He said again: “Spector!” But the screen kept flickering, and only shadowy hints of the librarian’s form appeared in short takes.

Maryan held her throat, coughed, and sat down abruptly on a steel bench from which dust flew up.

Alex pressed his fingertips against the Spector screen and moved his hands about as if he could force the elusive advisor to step out. Then he noticed a red sign to one side and brushed his wrist over it. The faded white letters “Emergency Screen” became visible. He touched the sign, and a fractured blue enveloped the screen. Only partially legible, it portrayed a map of the space station. As Alex touched various parts with his fingertips, they popped up in detailed 3-D relief, holographically, inches outside the screen surface. When he ran his hands over the models, they turned at his bidding. “Spector!” he cried. “Help us! We need air!”

Maryan rose and stumbled toward the screen pointing. “Look, there is a green area in the center of the station.” She pressed her hands against it, and the area rose in relief. They saw a forest at the heart of the station. The display did not seem to be aware of the ship’s wrecked state. The station was a cylinder about twenty miles long and five miles in diameter. Their boat had entered a larger end-cap section filled with tier upon tier of shops, streets, hotels, a whole city—empty of life. The external skin of the cylinder, ruined and airless, encompassed several decks of living and working space on a vast scale—each deck several hundred square miles in area. The innermost deck, facing into the open cylinder, apparently had been designed as a series of parks and farms but was now a jungle of forests and swamps under a glowing internal sky. It was a dark-green wilderness with reddish sunlight looming behind huge trees; so the interior had become a huge forest, a jungle, and therefore must contain some breathable air as it reprocessed carbon. It was a rash guess, but they were running out of breathable air by the minute.

Alex took a look at Maryan, who had slumped with her back against the screen and was holding her face in her hands. Could they get there in time? Desperately, Alex strode to the front of the boat. There, he waved his arms, cutting through layers of hanging cloth and dusty cobwebs. Coughing, he cleared his way to a forward view screen, under which he saw a panel that looked as if it might be a cover over manual steering controls. He tried to pry it open with his hands, but the cover stuck. He picked up a loose bar of composite steel, like a crow bar, and pried at the panel until it snapped and fell off. Inside was a small bank of lights—all burned out, dull amber and red with a few greens mixed in—and control buttons. A few of the buttons shattered under his touch, and the plastic-like material dribbled away under his fingertips. But the underlying steel shafts were intact—apparently made of a corrosion-resistant alloy or composite—and he boldly pressed them, testing their function.

At first he felt nothing and was afraid that the boat’s controls were dead. After all, how many eons had she lain silent and unmoving in frozen sleep, her materials weakening from the sheer passage of time?

Then, a sudden lurch—and the boat slammed against the deck, worsening its injuries. No telling if the new structural damage was letting air out faster—but this boat would never fly in space again. Alex worked the controls feverishly. “Hang on, Maryan. I’m going to try and get us to that forested area.”

Suddenly the boat lifted smoothly, and for a moment he thought he had its controls in hand. The next moment she lurched, left with her stern, then slammed down on the steel deck again. Alex groaned. He could just imagine slamming this thing down until it broke open and they lay dying like gaping fish on the inhospitable steel walkway. With both hands, he continued pressing buttons as he learned their functioning. He was beginning to feel short of breath, and his arteries were pounding in his throat. How much longer? Maybe just minutes. God, something had to happen, and quick!

As if reading his mind, the boat floated up a finger’s breath, so it was free of friction, and accelerated in a leftward sideways motion.

“Alex!” Maryan cried, watching the wall of shop windows approaching.

“I’m trying—“ he started to say, pumping the buttons, but he couldn’t control the boat.

The windows and walls approached in a blur of speed.

Alex and Maryan felt the shudder, but did not hear the slam of shattered glass, as the boat spun through department store windows. Still spinning—in fact, accelerating—the boat bashed through great empty halls in which decayed signs hung overhead and dusty counters vanished in puffs of dust. Effigies—mannequins male and female, some near naked in faded pink, some holding a pensive finger to a lip or touching what had once been a hat or a hairdo, or holding a hand near a hip where once had been a trouser pocket, toppled out of the way as the boat crashed wildly and careened about. Ancient lights flickered on, then winked out just as quickly as their circuits smoked under the load. Some vanished in showers of sparks as their wiring was torn out of the ceiling. The boat rocketed on like a carnival ride gone wild. She crashed like a ballistic cigar immersed in a bow wake of flickering blue lights and reddish flames, then slammed through a rear wall, across a silently frozen street in a night scene without neons, and into another level of stores. From there, she changed direction, spinning counter-clockwise, and down through a mezzanine, partially weightless, down multiple balcony levels, and through a gloomy courtyard, down an alley framed in faux brick, through a plate window—and into a mass of trees.

There, the ride came to an end as the boat couldn’t navigate through the dense trunks, turned upward but couldn’t mount the traction to climb into the interior central sky, then burrowed nose down until she came to a stop in the ground. At that, the engine died. Breakers slammed, the lights went out, and fire sparked. The boat would never fly anywhere again.