I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON
After takeoff the ship routinely monitored the condition of the sixty people sleeping in its cryonic tanks. One malfunction showed, that of person nine. His EEG revealed brain activity.
S-t, the ship said to itself.
Complex homeostatic devices locked into circuit feed, and
the ship contacted person nine.
“You are slightly awake,” the ship said, utilizing the psychotronic route; there was no point in rousing person nine to full consciousness-after all, the flight would last a decade.
Virtually unconscious, but unfortunately still able to think, person nine thought, Someone is addressing me. He said, “Where am I located? 1 don’t see anything.”
“You’re in faulty cryonic suspension.”
He said, “Then 1 shouldn’t be able to hear you.”
” ‘Faulty,’ 1 said. That’s the point; you can hear me. Do you
know your name?”
“Victor Kemmings. Bring me out of this.”
“We are in flight.”
“Then put me under.”
“just a moment.” The ship examined the cryonic mechanisms; it scanned and surveyed and then it said, “I will try.”
Time passed. Victor Kemmings, unable to see anything, unaware of his body, found himself still conscious. “Lower my temperature,” he said. He could not hear his voice; perhaps he only imagined he spoke. Colors floated toward him and then rushed at him. He liked the colors; they reminded him of a child’s paint box, the semi animated kind, an artificial life-form. He had used them in school, two hundred years ago.
“I can’t put you under,” the voice of the ship sounded inside Kemmings’s head. “The malfunction is too elaborate; I can’t correct it and I can’t repair it. You will be conscious for ten years.”
The semi animated colors rushed toward him, but now they possessed a sinister quality, supplied to them by his own fear. “Oh my God,” he said. Ten years! The colors darkened.
As Victor Kemmings lay paralyzed, surrounded by dismal flickerings of light, the ship explained to him its strategy. This strategy did not represent a decision on its part; the ship had been programmed to seek this solution in case of a malfunction of this sort.
“What I will do,” the voice of the ship came to him, “is feed you sensory stimulation. The peril to you is sensory deprivation. If you are conscious for ten years without sensory data, your mind will deteriorate. When we reach the LR4 System, you will be a vegetable.”
“Well, what do you intend to feed me?” Kemmings said in panic. “What do you have in your information storage banks? All the video soap operas of the last century? Wake me lip and I’ll walk around.”
“There is no air in me,” the ship said. “Nothing for you to eat.
No one to talk to, since everyone else is under.”
Kemmings said, “I can talk to you. We can play chess.”
“Not for ten years. Listen to me; I say, I have no food and no
air. You must remain as you are. ..a bad compromise, but one forced on us. You are talking to me now. I have no particular information stored. Here is policy in these situations: I will feed you your own buried memories, emphasizing the pleasant ones. You possess two hundred and six years of memories and most of them have sunk down into your unconscious. This is a splendid source of sensory data for you to receive. Be of good cheer. This situation, which you are in, is not unique. It has never happened within my domain before, but I am programmed to deal with it. Relax and trust me. I will see that you are provided with a world.”
“They should have warned me,” Kemmings said, “before I agreed to emigrate.”
“Relax,” the ship said,
He relaxed, but he was terribly frightened. Theoretically, he
should have gone under, into the successful cryonic suspension, then awakened a moment later at his star of destination; or rather the planet, the colony planet, of that star. Everyone else aboard the ship lay in an unknowing state-,he was the exception, as if bad karma had attacked him for obscure reasons. Worst of all, he had to depend totally on the goodwill of the ship. Suppose it elected to feed him monsters? The ship could terrorize him for ten years-ten objective years and undoubtedly more from a subjective standpoint. He was, in effect, totally in the ship’s power. Did interstellar ships enjoy such a situation? He knew little about interstellar ships; his field was microbiology. Let me think, he said to himself. My first wife, Martine; the lovely little French girl who wore jeans and a red shirt open
at the waist and cooked delicious crepes.
“I hear ,” the ship said. “So be it.”
The rushing colors resolved themselves into coherent, stable
shapes. A building: a little old yellow wooden house that he had owned when he was nineteen years old, in Wyoming. “Wait,” he said in panic. “The foundation was bad; it was on a mud sill. And the roof leaked.” But he saw the kitchen, with the table that he had built himself. And he felt glad.
“You will not know, after a little while,” the ship said, “that I am feeding you your own buried memories.”
“I haven’t thought of that house in a century,” he said wonderingly; entranced, he made out his old electric drip coffee pot with the box of paper filters beside it. This is the house where
Martine and I lived, he realized. “Martine!” he said aloud.
“I’m on the phone,” Martine said from the living room.
The ship said, “I will cut in only when there is an emergency. I
will be monitoring you, however, to be sure you are in a satisfactory state. Don’t be afraid.”
“Turn down the right rear burner on the stove,” Martine called. He could hear her and yet not see her. He made his way from the kitchen through the dining room and into the living room. At the VF, Martine stood in rapt conversation with her brother; she wore shorts and she was barefoot. Through the
front windows of the living room he could see the street; a commercial vehicle was trying to park, without success.
It’s a warm day, he thought. I should turn on the air conditioner.
He seated himself on the old sofa as Martine continued her VF conversation, and he found himself gazing at his most cherished possession, a framed poster on the wall above Martine: Gilbert Shelton’s “Fat Freddy Says” drawing in which Freddy Freak sits with his cat on his lap, and Fat Freddy is trying to say, “Speed kills,” but he is so wired on speed-he holds in his hand every kind of amphetamine tablet, pill, spansule, and capsule that exists-that he can’t say it, and the cat is gritting his teeth and wincing in a mixture of dismay and disgust. The poster is signed by Gilbert Shelton himself; Kemmings’s best friend Ray Torrance gave it to him and Martine as a wedding present. It is worth thousands. It was signed by the artist back in the 1980s. Long before either Victor Kemmings or Martine lived.
If we ever run out of money, Kemmings thought to himself, we could sell the poster. It was not a poster; it was the poster. Martine adored it. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers-from the golden age of a long-ago society. No wonder he loved Martine so; she herself loved back, loved the beauties of the world, and treasured and cherished them as she treasured and cherished him; it was a protective love that nourished but did not stifle. It had been her idea to frame the poster; he would have
tacked it up on the wall, so stupid was he.
“Hi,” Martine said, off the VF now. “What are you thinking?” “Just that you keep alive what you love,” he said.
“I think that’s what you’re supposed to do,” Martine said.
“Are you ready for dinner? Open some red wine, a cabernet.”
“Will an ’07 do?” he said, standing up; he felt, then, like
taking hold of his wife and hugging her.
“Either an ’07 or a ’12.” She trotted past him, through the
dining room and into the kitchen.
Going down into the cellar, he began to search among the bottles, which, of course, lay flat. Musty air and dampness; he liked the smell of the cellar, but then he noticed the redwood planks lying half-buried in the dirt and he thought, I know I’ve
got to get a concrete slab poured. He forgot about the wine and went over to the far comer, where the dirt was piled highest; bending down, he poked at a board. ..he poked with a trowel and then he thought, Where did I get this trowel? I didn’t have it a minute ago. The board crumbled against the trowel. This whole house is collapsing, he realized. Christ sake. I better tell Martine.
Going back upstairs, the wine forgotten, he started to say to her that the foundations of the house were dangerously decayed, but Martine was nowhere in sight. And nothing cooked on the stove-no pots, no pans. Amazed, he put his hand on the stove and found it cold. Wasn’t she just now cooking? he asked himself.