The Kruton Interface Read online

  “Well, they say they’ll do most of their crucial work when we power down, once we get to Sector Four.”

  “Still crazy.”

  “Yes, sir. Dr. Strangefinger’s a strange man. But he has the government and most of the brass behind him.’’

  “Sad, but true,” Wanker said. “I’ve been reading about him in Midnight People. What the hell’s Marxism?’’

  “Sir, I don’t know. I do know that Dr. Strangefinger is considered by the intellectuals to be some kind of artist as well as a scientist.”

  “Right,” Wanker confirmed. “Says here he’s a ‘neo-dada existential agit-prop performance artist.’ What the devil is that?”

  “Can’t tell you, sir.”

  “Seems to me they’re just a bunch of artsy-fartsy types who run around dressing up and using personality brainware. ‘Wireheads’ is the street term.”

  “Yup. Heard of them, sir.”

  “But what I can’t understand is this fascination for the twentieth century.”

  “Oh, it’s all the rage, sir. Twentieth-Century Revival is the latest fad in art, literature, science, and that stuff.”

  “How can you have fads in science? I thought science is above that. What the devil could ‘post-ultramod’ physics be about?”

  “Beats the hell out of me, sir.”

  Wanker collapsed the screen window holding the magazine text. “Don’t know why I waste my time reading that rag.”

  “It’s one of the oldest newsfiles in existence, sir. A respected intellectual journal.”

  “Can’t hold a candle to The Enquiring New Yorker. Never mind. I gave you orders, Mr. Rhodes. Carry them out.”

  “Aye-aye, Skipper!”

  “Skipper of what?”

  * * *

  Over the next several days things were quiet in the ship. If Dr. Strangefinger’s staff was busy at work making alterations to the ship’s propulsion system, no one noticed them much.

  The crew did notice the strange sounds coming out of Dr. Strangefinger’s tiny cabin. Darvona spent most of her off-duty hours there, but she was enigmatic about it.

  “Oh, we’re just having fun. Ever hear of a ‘happening’?”

  Sven shook his head.

  “Neither did I. It’s fun. Why don’t you join us?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Sven did, and a few hours later he was seen leaving the suite with a strange smile on his face.

  “Tell me one thing,” a curious Mr. Rhodes asked. “What’s the honking all about?”

  Sven shrugged. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “And how come every time I pass by, and the door’s open a crack, I hear someone say, ‘Make that three hard-boiled eggs’?”

  “Well, sir… ”

  “Yeah, hard to explain. All right. I guess I’ll just have to see for myself what this is all about. You know, just for the sake of ship security.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Rhodes. It’s well within the purview of your duties as first officer.”

  “Well, sure. In fact… why are you smirking, Mr. Svensen?”

  “Smirking, sir? Me?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “Thing I really can’t figure is how so many people can fit in that cubbyhole.’”

  * * *

  For the rest of the journey to Sector Four, Mr. Rhodes wore a strange smile. His eyes had a slightly glassy look. All the officers took their off-duty hours in the “Stateroom,” as Strangefinger’s cabin was now called. Everyone on the ship made the visit at one time or another. And with the Repulse being run almost entirely by the automatic systems, everyone on the ship was often in there at one time.

  The only other event marking the journey was the death of Dr. O’Gandhi, his third for the month.

  “His third?” Wanker said in utter disbelief.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” Mr. Rhodes said. “He’s revived already, good as new.”

  “Another clinical death?”

  “Yes, sir. He really does need some time in the shop.”

  * * *

  Everyone hung out in the Stateroom—everyone, that is, but Captain Wanker.

  He spent his time watching entertainment, working acrostics, and reading.

  “Give me something on the twentieth century,” he ordered the ship’s librarian.

  “Please be more specific,” the voice droned.

  “Something representative of that century. I want to find out what it’s all about.”

  “It is impossible to designate one artifact or intangible that is representative of an entire century.”

  “Okay, let’s limit it to.… oh, entertainment. No, art. No, wait, to hell with art. Uh, how about literature?”

  After a pause, the librarian said, “What about literature?”

  “Give me the representative work of literature—play, novel, poem, whatever, of the twentieth century.”

  “It is impossible—”

  “All right! Give me a list. Can you do that?”

  “That can be done. Moment.”

  Presently, Wanker’s screen filled with a list of titles with names.

  “Splendid.”

  He read through the list. Both titles and names were unfamiliar to him, except for Marcel Proust.

  “Uh, who would you recommend—besides Proust, that is?”

  “Any of the works listed are thought by critics and scholars to be exemplars of twentieth century literature. Marcel Proust—”

  “To hell with Proust. Who’s Ernest Hemingway?”

  “Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in the United States of America, Earth, on—”

  “Stop, never mind. Who’s this George Luis Borges fellow? Forget it. Never heard of any of these people. Maybe I should try the twenty-first century. At least they had Stephen King.”

  “He was twentieth century.”

  “Then why isn’t he listed here? Shows you how much scholars know. Okay. So, this is it for literature in the twentieth. Right. Ummmmm… Okay. Give me something daring. New, innovative. Experimental. Weren’t they big on that stuff back then?”

  “The work best fitting that description is highlighted.”

  “James Joyce, huh? Whoever he was. Finngans Wake? What’s the format? Just text, I suppose.”

  “There are illustrations.”

  “No video? Hmph. All right, put up the text and … You call those illustrations? They’re doodles.”

  “Done by the author.”

  “Silly. Okay, let’s read this thing.”

  Wanker began to read.

  A moment later he sat back with a look of annoyed perplexity.

  “What the hell is this supposed to be? What language is this?”

  “The author’s idiosyncratic dialect of Anglo-Irish.”

  “Huh? I can’t understand a word of it. Is there a translation?”

  “No translation is available.”

  “But this is gibberish!”

  The librarian made no comment.

  “Take it away. Thank you very much.”

  Captain Wanker capitulated. He whiled away the rest of the journey in one of the ship’s simsex pods.

  CHAPTER 10

  Lt. Diane Warner-Hillary announced, “Captain, we have entered Galactic Sector Four.”

  “Begin deceleration to subluminal velocity,” the captain ordered. “Continue on present course.”

  “Aye-aye, Cap’n,” said Lt. Commander Angus Sadowski.

  * * *

  The electrogravitic field that surrounded the star-ship Repulse changed polarity. The ship still occupied a bubble in the continuum—an area outside of space and time but not very far from either, in which conventional physical laws could be bent but not broken. But now that bubble was contracting. When the ship dropped below the speed of light, the Repulse popped back into normal space and became a conventional physical object again, subject to the usual laws governing its ilk, as opposed to a set of quantum probabiliti
es, which it had been reduced to inside the bubble.

  The ship underwent tremendous deceleration in a short time. A partial dispensation from Newtonian physics (as opposed to Einsteinian) was in effect as long as the electrogravitic field still existed. Had this not been so, the ship’s occupants would have been squashed to jelly against the forward bulkheads.

  The star cruiser’s speed dropped dramatically. Slower and slower it went, until the Repulse was barely moving at all—a mere hundred kilometers per second. Practically at a dead stop, the ship drifted in a vastness that was more empty than most regions of interstellar space. Here floated a molecule of gas, there a mote of dust. The Repulse had not much else for a neighbor, except for a faintly luminescent nebula and an even fainter ring of glowing gas. The latter hung two points off starboard at a distance of about half a light-year.

  * * *

  At last, word came that the captain would come out of his cabin and go to the bridge. Mr. Rhodes and Darvona stood by the hatch, as if in wait of some miraculous coming-out, a white figure in a shroud, perhaps.

  The hatch rolled up and Wanker stepped out.

  He saw the two standing there.

  “What the devil do you want?”

  “Nice to see you again, sir!” Mr. Rhodes said. “Just want to accompany you to the bridge.”

  “Oh?” Wanker grumbled something unintelligible. He looked around. “What’s Strangefinger been up to?”

  “Not a lot, sir, while we’ve been under power. But they’ll begin in earnest now.”

  “Crazy business, doing this out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Security reasons, sir. The doctor said they couldn’t trust the graving dock crew.”

  “I wouldn’t trust Strangefinger any farther than I could spit.”

  Wanker smoothed his rumpled fatigue uniform, which he’d slept in a few nights. Red stubble grew in tufts on his cheek. He hadn’t bathed in quite a while.

  “You look fine, sir,” Darvona told him, as if reading his doubts.

  “Maybe I’d better step into the fogger,” Wanker said. “Get freshened up.”

  “Captain, you’re okay,” Mr. Rhodes said, afraid that Wanker would never come out again if he ducked back in. “Please, let’s go to the bridge.”

  “Well, all right.”

  Reluctantly, the captain followed them to the nearest access tube.

  * * *

  The captain seated himself at the captain’s console, an extremely complex display of instruments that he had yet to study. He felt guilty about that. Above it hung a huge thing like an oversize helmet—the cyberhelmet, or communications sensorium. It was a virtual reality device that put him in intimate contact with the ship, its environs, its instruments, and with certain key crew members. Used mostly during combat, it was also a tricky thing to master.

  He pushed a button and the helmet lowered. He poked his head inside it.

  It was dark inside. Was the thing on? It was supposed to be on all the time. Then he noticed a legend in his peripheral vision: TEMPORARILY INOPERATIVE. Well, so much for the cyberhelmet. He pushed the thing off his head.

  “Navigator! What is our exact position?”

  Warner-Hillary answered, “We’re about ten trillion kilometers from the edge of the Kruton Interface… give or take, you know, a couple billion kilometers. Sort of. I mean, we’re kind of like in the middle of nowhere.”

  Wanker regarded the navigator in silence for a moment. Then he said patronizingly, “Thanks for that travelogue, Lieutenant. Can you be a bit more specific?”

  “Well, sir, we’re kind of like… here.” Warner-Hillary touched a finger to her screen. “I’ll punch it up on your monitor, sir.”

  “I have it.”

  “Okay, sir, you see that fuzzy blob there toward the top of the screen?”

  Wanker studied bis screen. “Fuzzy blob toward the top of the screen … you mean the one that’s ring-shaped?”

  “Ring-shaped?”

  “All right, what about it?”

  “Okay, we’re about three decimeters to the right of it, and a little bit down.”

  Three decimeters … ? But that’s off my screen.”

  “Huh? It’s on my screen, sir… Wait a minute. You’ve got the wrong blob. It’s on the other side. The one that looks like a weasel.”

  “Weasel? Oh, you mean this one? That’s no weasel. You mean the camel.”

  “Sir, it doesn’t look like a camel to me. Looks like a weasel.”

  “Ridiculous. It looks like a camel. See the humps?”

  “What bumps, sir?”

  “Humps. Those little things there. Little humps.”

  Warner-Hillary inclined her head. “I can’t see any little humps.”

  “There are two of them, like a camel.”

  “Sir, it looks like a weasel to me.”

  “Mr. Rhodes, come here, please.”

  Rhodes got up from his console and came to the captain’s.

  Wanker tapped the screen. “Doesn’t this look like a camel to you?”

  Rhodes studied it. “Sir, that looks like a humped weasel.”

  “A what?”

  “Humped weasel, sir. It’s a species found on Proxima Centauri Two. Good eating.”

  “Nonsense. That’s a camel.”

  “Well, sir, it’s backed like a weasel.”

  “It isn’t backed like a weasel, it’s backed like a camel.”

  Darvona peered over their shoulders. “Looks like a whale to me.”

  Wanker rose from his seat, then both he and the first officer took a step back to regard the screen from a fresh perspective.

  “The hell it does,” Wanker said.

  “Oh, I think it does,” Rhodes said. “If you look at it sideways.”

  “Huh? Oh. Well, maybe.”

  “In fact, I think it looks very like a whale.”

  “You’re both balmy. Anyway, Navigator, where did you say we are again?”

  “Well, sir, just about two decimeters to the right of that weasel blob—”

  “I thought you said three decimeters?”

  “Well, not exactly three. Maybe two, two and a half.”

  “The captain’s right, it’s a camel,” Sven said, having gotten up and come to look.

  “You see?” Wanker said. I’m not imagining things.”

  “Well, it is a bit camel-like, sir,” Rhodes admitted.

  “It’s a lot camel-like,” Wanker insisted.

  “I still say it’s a whale,” Darvona said.

  “Oh, come on,” Sven said. “That’s about as much like a whale as my butt.”

  “Having never seen your butt, Ensign,” Darvona said archly, “I couldn’t say.”

  Svensen guffawed. “Oh, you mean to say there are some butts you don’t have an intimate acquaintance with?”

  Darvona’s eyes flared. “I could say the same for you, you little fruit!” She slapped him.

  Sven looked momentarily shocked. Then he became instantly furious. “Slut!” He slapped her back.

  It was Darvona’s turn for shock. “Catamite!” Another slap.

  “Hussy!” And another.

  “Buttboy!” And still another.

  “What the devil is this?” the captain wanted to know. “An officer does not strike another officer!”

  “He started it,” Darvona said hotly.

  “I want both of you—”

  “Sir! Excuse me, Captain?”

  “This is a disgrace—What, Navigator?”

  “Sir, that was an error.”

  “What was an error?”

  “Our position. We’re not where I said.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Okay. See those sounding markers in the middle of the screen?”

  “What sounding markers?”

  “Those little numbers there, the ones that tell you the density of the interstellar medium in that region? We’re right about in there, somewhere.”

  “Oh, those numbers. Is that what they are?
”

  “Yeah, it tells you the density of gas and dust and that stuff.”

  “Okay, what about—?” The captain whirled in his seat. “Will you two stop slapping each other?”

  Hooker!” Slap!

  “Fairy!” Slap!

  “Doxy!” Slap!

  “Faggot!” Slap!

  “Sir, if you’ll just look at the map—”

  “Wait just a minute, Navigator!”

  Rhodes said, “Lieutenant, please indicate our position by using coordinates.”

  “That function is, uh, nonfunctional, sir.”

  “The coordinate-plotter is down?”

  “Yes, sir. And I can’t get the flashing indicator to work either. But if you’ll just go to the right of those sounding markers—I’m sorry, to the left.”

  “Where, where?” the captain wailed. “For God’s sake, where the hell are we?”

  “Flit!”

  “Whore!”

  “Pansy!”

  “Harlot!”

  “Will you two—? Navigator, for God’s sake, please, will you tell me, without any equivocation whatsoever, what the position of this ship is in relation to the Kruton Interface?”

  Warner-Hillary made a vague gesture. “It’s off in that direction.”

  “Thank you so much. That is truly a big help.”

  “Well, sir, nothing is really working right.”

  “We just pulled out of a graving dock after five days of refitting!”

  “Sir, the crew was gone during that time, and they didn’t come back. The computer tech people are all enlisted personnel, and they’re responsible for fixing the ship’s computers.”

  Wanker raised his arms in resignation. “You’re right of course, Lieutenant, not your fault. But we really have to know where that verboten territory is.”

  “Don’t worry, sir, we’re really nowhere near it.”

  Wanker looked relieved. “Well, that’s comforting.” He turned around. “What’s happening now?”

  Darvona and Sven had stopped exchanging blows and were now embracing, both blubbering apologies.

  They’re making up, sir,” Rhodes told him.

  “How nice. How lovely. All stop!”