Steele, Allen - The Days Between

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 54KB 14 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Allen%20Steele%20-%20The%20Days%20Between.txt

THE DAYS BETWEEN

by Allen Steele

Three months after leaving Earth, the URSS _Alabama_ had just achieved cruise velocity when

the accident occurred: Leslie Gillis woke up.

He regained consciousness slowly, as if emerging from long and dreamless sleep. His body,

naked and hairless, floated within the blue-green gelatin that filled the interior of his

biostasis cell, an oxygen mask covering the lower part of his face and thin plastic tubes inserted

in his arms. As his vision cleared, Gillis saw that the cell had been lowered to a horizontal

position and that its fiberglass lid had folded open. The lighting within the hibernation deck was

subdued, yet he had to open and close his eyes several times before his retinas were able to take

even that little illumination.

His first lucid thought was: _Thank God, I made it._

His body felt weak, his limbs stiff. Just as he had been cautioned to do during flight

training, he carefully moved only a little at a time. As Gillis gently flexed the muscles of his

arms and legs, he vaguely wondered why no one had come to his aid. Perhaps Dr. Okada was busy

helping the others emerge from biostasis. Yet he could hear nothing save for a sublime electrical

hum; no voices, no movement.

His next thought was: _Something's wrong_.

Back aching against the strain, his arms feeling as if they were about to dislocate from his

shoulders, Gillis grasped the sides of the cell and tried to sit up. For a minute or so he

struggled against the phlegmatic embrace of the suspension fluid; there was a wet sucking sound as

he prized his body upward, then the tubes went taut before he remembered that he had to take them

out. Clenching his teeth, Gillis pinched off the tubes between thumb and forefinger and, one by

one, carefully removed them from his arms. The oxygen mask came off last; the air was frigid and

it stung his throat and lungs, and he coughed in agonized spasms as, with the last ounce of his

strength, he clambered out of the tank. His legs couldn't hold him, and he collapsed upon the cold

floor of the deck.

Gillis didn't know how long he lay curled in a fetal position, his hands tucked into his

groin. He never really lost consciousness, yet for a long while his mind lingered somewhere

between awareness and sleep, his unfocused eyes gazing at the burnished metal plates of the floor.

After awhile the cold penetrated his dulled senses; the suspension fluid was freezing against his

bare skin, and he dully realized that if he lay here much longer he would soon lapse into

hypothermia.

Gillis rolled over on his back, forced himself to sit up. Aquamarine fluid drooled down his

body, formed a shallow pool around his hips; he hugged his shoulders, rubbing his chilled flesh.

Once again, he wondered why no one was paying any attention to him. Yes, he was only the

communications officer, yet there were others farther up the command hierarchy who should have

been revived by now. Kuniko Okada was the last person he had seen before the somatic drugs entered

his system; as Chief Physician, she also would have been the last crew member to enter biostasis

and the first to emerge. She would have then brought up -- Gillis sought to remember specific

details -- the Chief Engineer, Dana Monroe, who would have then ascertained that _Alabama_'s major

systems were operational. If the ship was in nominal condition, Captain Lee would have been

revived next, shortly followed by First Officer Shapiro, Executive Officer Tinsley, Senior

Navigator Ullman, and then Gillis himself. Yes, that was the correct procedure.

So where was everyone else?

First things first. He was wet and naked, and the ship's internal temperature had been

lowered to 50 degrees. He had to find some clothes. His teeth chattering, Gillis staggered to his

feet, then lurched across the deck to a nearby locker. Opening it, he found a stack of clean white

towels and a pile of folded robes. As he wiped the moist gel from his body, he recalled his

embarrassment when his turn had come for Kuniko to prepare him for hibernation. It was bad enough

to have his body shaved, yet when her electric razor had descended to his pubic area he found

himself becoming involuntarily aroused by her gentle touch. Amused by his reaction, she had smiled

at him in a motherly way. _Just relax_, she said. _Think about something else..._

He turned, and for the first time saw the rest of the biostasis cells were still upright

within their niches. Thirteen white fiberglass coffins, each resting at a forty-five degree angle

within the bulkhead walls of Deck C2A. Electrophoretic displays on their lids emitted a warm amber

glow, showing the status of the crewmembers contained within. Here was the _Alabama_'s command

team, just as he had last seen them: Lee, Shapiro, Tinsley, Okada, Monroe, Ullman...

Everyone was still asleep. Everyone except himself.

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Allen%20Steele%20-%20The%20Days%20Between.txt (1 of 14) [11/1/2004 12:28:04 AM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Allen%20Steele%20-%20The%20Days%20Between.txt

Gillis hastily pulled on a robe, then strode across the deck to the nearest window. Its outer

shutter was closed, yet when he pressed the button that moved it upward, all he saw were distant

stars against black space. Of course, he might not be able to see 47 Ursae Majoris from this

particular porthole. He needed to get to the command center, check the navigation instruments.

As he turned from the window, something caught his eye: the readout on the nearest biostasis

cell. Trembling with unease as much as cold, Gillis moved closer to examine it. The screen

identified the sleeper within as _Cortez, Raymond B._ -- Ray Cortez, the life-support chief -- and

all his life-signs seemed normal as far as he could tell, yet that wasn't what attracted his

attention. On the upper left side was a time-code:

E/: 7.8.70 / 22:10:01 GMT

July 8, 2070. That was the date everyone had entered hibernation, three days after the

_Alabama_ had made its unscheduled departure from Highgate. On the upper right side of the screen,

though, was another time-code:

P/: 10.3.70 / 00.21.23 GMT

October 3, 2070. Today's date and time.

The _Alabama_ had been in flight for only three months. Three months of a voyage across forty-

six light-years which, at 20 percent of light-speed, would take more 230 years to complete.

For several long minutes, Gillis stared at the readout, unwilling to believe the evidence of

his own eyes. Then he turned and walked across the compartment to the manhole. His bare feet

slapping against the cool metal rungs, he climbed down the ladder to the next deck of the

hibernation module.

Fourteen more biostasis cells, all within their niches. None were open.

Fighting panic, Gillis scrambled further down the ladder to Deck C2C. Again, fourteen closed

cells.

Still clutching at some intangible shred of hope, Gillis quickly visited Deck C2D, then he

scurried back up the ladder and entered the short tunnel leading to the _Alabama_'s second

hibernation module. By the time he reached Deck C1D, he had checked every biostasis cell belonging

to the starship's one hundred and three remaining passengers, yet he hadn't found one which was

open.

He sagged against a bulkhead, and for a long time he could do nothing except tremble with

fear.

He was alone.

* * *

After awhile, Gillis pulled himself together. All right, something had obviously gone wrong.

The computers controlling the biostasis systems had made a critical error and had prematurely

awakened him from hibernation. Okay, then; all he had to do was put himself back into the loop.

The robe he had found wasn't very warm, so he made his way through the circular passageway

connecting the ship's seven ring modules until he entered C4, one of two modules that would serve

as crew quarters once the _Alabama_ reached 47 Ursae Majoris. He tried not to look at the rows of

empty bunks as he searched for the locker where he stowed his personal belongings. His blue

jumpsuit was where he had left it three months ago, hanging next to the isolation garment he had

worn when he left Gingrich Space Center to board the shuttle up the Highgate; on a shelf above it,

next to his high-top sneakers, was the small cardboard box containing the precious few mementos he

had been permitted to take with him. Gillis deliberately ignored the box as he pulled on his

jumpsuit; he'd look at the stuff inside once he reached his final destination, and that wouldn't

be for another 230 years ... 226 years, if you considered the time-dilation factor, but why split

hairs?

The command center, located on Deck H4 within the ship's cylindrical hub, was cold and dark.

The lights had been turned down and the rectangular windows along its circular hull were

shuttered; only the soft glow emitted by a few control panels pierced the gloom. Gillis took a

moment to switch on the ceiling lights; spotting the environmental control station, he briefly

considered adjusting the thermostat to make things a bit warmer, then decided against it. He had

been trained as a communications specialist; his technical understanding of the rest of the

_Alabama_'s major systems was cursory at best, and he was reluctant to make any changes that might

influence the ship's operating condition. Besides, he wasn't staying here for very long; once he

returned to biostasis, the cold wouldn't make much difference to him.

All the same, it was his duty to check the ship's condition, so he walked over to the nav

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Allen%20Steele%20-%20The%20Days%20Between.txt (2 of 14) [11/1/2004 12:28:04 AM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Steele, Allen - The Days Between.pdf

共14页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Steele, Allen - The Days Between

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: