CHAPTER 11
“I love you,” Wentz whispered.
“I love you too,” Joyce hotly whispered back.
His hands molded against her soft flesh; her perfect breasts swayed above his face. Her beautiful dark visage lowered, to kiss him, and Wentz was swept away. His life, for the first time, was perfect.
As he penetrated her, moving with her pleasure, he raised his hands to caress her face—
And when she saw them—his hands, his mutilated, three-fingered hands shiny with scar tissue—
She screamed.
She screamed and pulled away, crawling backward. She began to vomit as she fell off the bed. Wentz lurched up, crawling toward her, and at that same moment, the bedroom door clicked open, and Pete peered in.
“Dad, what—”
“Close the door!” Wentz shouted, pointing at his son.
Pete screamed when he glimpsed his father’s hands.
The door slammed shut.
When Wentz looked over the edge of the bed, he saw that his wife had turned into a swollen, vermiculated corpse. Eyes popped and running with fluid. Her skin blue-green. Lumpen bile slipping from her once-pert, now- rotten lips.
“I hate you,” the corpse gargled. “I hate you, and so does your son…”
When Wentz came awake, he was gagging at the remnant dream-stench of death.
The wall clock ticked. Just past 4 a.m.
He showered, shaved, donned his service whites. He zipped up his leather mitts. When he left his quarters, silence seemed to stalk his footfalls. Level Thirteen was a white labyrinth with no vanishing point. Eventually, he found himself in the OEV vault. The sentries in the shadows didn’t move; Wentz felt alone, which was what he wanted. He paced around the OEV, not looking at it as much as looking at his life. He thought about Joyce, he thought about Pete, he thought about all the things he would miss now, but then remembered there was no alternative. There never had been.
The training blocks and the test blocks all seemed unreal now. They were distant dreams; they were like stories someone had told him. When he tried to see the last six weeks in his mind…it wasn’t him in the operator’s seat of the OEV. It was someone else. A dream man.
But today was no dream. His hands had three fingers each. That was real. And in a few hours he would be using those hands—and the instincts they were connected to—to pilot an extraterrestrial vehicle to Mars.
This was real.
Wentz stared at the OEV. They’d had to repaint it each and every time he’d taken it out. It looked surreal with its desert-sand paint on the top, and the heather-blue on the bottom.
All at once, Wentz couldn’t believe what he was looking at, nor what he was about to do in just a few hours.
He looked at his watch…
What felt like twenty minutes had stretched to four hours.
It was 0758.
The vault door clanked, then began to rise. Bright white light spilled into the hangar and a figure stood in stark-black silhouette.
Major “Jones” stepped out of the light.
“General, it’s time for you to get to the ready room. Time to suit up.”
Wentz could hear his watch ticking. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
««—»»
A pressure-suit wasn’t necessary; the OEV maintained flawless cabin pressure of 14.7 psi or exactly 100 kilopascals, close to identical to earth conditions at sea level. In the past, Wentz had worn a simple simulator helmet, since Ashton had monitored the SINGARS radio channels.
“I need a CVC helmet,” Wentz informed Jones, “for commo.”
“No, you don’t, sir,” Jones replied.
Another silhouette emerged from the bulkhead light. It was Ashton, dressed in the same flight suit series as Wentz.
“You’re coming?” Wentz asked.
“No offense, sir,” she said. “You may be the best pilot in the world, but considering you’ve got a 65-million- mile trip ahead of you, you might need a communications officer.”
“Cool with me.” Wentz extended his mitted hand toward the OEV. “Hop in.”
Wentz climbed up the trolley ladder. He slapped the exterior press-panel.
The top hatch hissed open.
“Let’s get this spam can rolling,” Wentz said.
««—»»
“Charlie-Oscar, this is Jonah One. Request permission to take off.”
The topside door stood yawning open. Bright sky glared beyond.
“Roger, Jonah One. You are cleared.”
“Time to cook,” he said.
Clouds sailed by, then so did the rest of the atmosphere. Moments later, they were plunged into star-flecked space.
“Is it me, or does this thing fly faster each time we go out?”
“Yes, sir,” Ashton responded, “though we haven’t come up with a technically sound hypothesis as to why.”
“The first time I went up, it seemed to take a lot longer to get out of the atmosphere,” Wentz observed.
“And maybe you weren’t paying attention, but your second trip to the moon took half as long as your first.”
“I can’t figure it. There’s no throttle, no fuel-flow, no type of velocity controls—”
“It’s all in your mind,” Ashton asserted. “That’s our guess, sir. General Farrington experienced the same thing. Each excursion to the Alpha Cent cluster consumed fewer flying hours. Increased confidence of the operator probably has something to do with it, and familiarization, too. The more flight-hours racked up on the OEV, the greater the feel you have with its total function. The more you get to know it, the faster it flies.”
Wentz’s brow furrowed. “It sounds like you’re telling me I’m having a relationship with a space ship.”
“In a sense, sir, you are. When you put your hands into the detents, you become connected to the vehicle, you become
“Bonding, huh? Guess it’s only a matter of time before I start buying it roses.”
Ashton remained serious. “Think about it, sir. It only makes sense. A guidance and propulsion system that
Wentz didn’t know if he was buying that one, and he preferred not to consider it. The mere fact that he was