SOMEONE’S SCREAMING. The sound bounces from wall to wall. It echoes along the corridor. And suddenly I’m awake.
A hush lies over the Jump recovery station. Dreaming, then. I wonder if I cried aloud. Around me, men slumber on tables like corpses in a morgue.
I hate the intimacy of travel. The helplessness. I hate knowing I was asleep while the stewards were awake. That once through the event horizon they carefully laid my body out, like some murderers display their victims.
Next to me Szabo dozes, a blanket pulled up to his chin. I have to be careful. HF is shrewd. When an investigator reaches the end of his usefulness, they send a spy. Who better than a psychic?
It could be anyone of them. I don’t know the team well enough: not Szabo the affable, not Arne the high-strung, not Beagle of the eternal life.
As I wait for a steward, I rub precipitate from my fingers. It comes away in greasy white rolls. When I look at Szabo the second time, I find him staring.
A steward has haphazardly cleaned Szabo’s face. Precipitate sloughs from his balding head. His full beard is caked with white. In that snowy chaos, his eyes are the bright clear blue of mountain lakes.
Why is he looking at me?
He politely averts his eyes. Must have read my mind. “I hate these trips,” Szabo says. “You’d think you’d get used to them after a while.”
I greet the words with silence, the same deadly silence that for eighteen months has settled in my rooms. Sometimes I imagine I convey that silence like some people carry their kitchen’s cooking smells in their clothes.
“ . . . prepared,” Szabo murmurs.
I stiffen. “What?”
When he speaks his voice is casual, like he’s hiding something. “I hope everything’s prepared for us down there. I hate confusion.”
“Major Holloway? You awake?”
Lawson’s abrupt appearance makes me flinch. He leans over, smiling.
“Let me help you up, sir.”
His grip is gentle. Bruises on my wrists have faded to bronze. My skin is forgiving. I’m not. If I wasn’t so rocky from the eleven-day sleep, I’d cold-cock him.
We don’t speak. He takes me to a cubicle and leaves me there. When I’m sure he’s gone, I depress a white button labeled SHOWER. A blast of hot soapy water nearly knocks me down.
Outside my stall are coughs and mutterings, the noise of running water, and shuffling feet. They are tired sounds, disoriented sounds, as though the inhabitants of a graveyard have awakened for Judgment.
Then, above my head, a ceiling tile flickers and goes out. I shouldn’t look. It’s not safe. I know that. But it happens so fast that it catches me off-guard.
There, just there. A black square in the ceiling, a neat hole punched into the universe. The giddy weightlessness of panic sucks me to it. My feet loosen from the floor. I reach out. Try to grab the tiles.
Just then I hear Szabo’s gut-loud, merry laugh. Where did he learn to make a happy sound like that?
I close my eyes and hang on to that laugh. Hang on tight. It feels as though, having been flung into space, I’ve grasped a cable stretched between Earth and the stars.