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Chapter 1 - The ParadoxWhen I saw it, I could only stare and wonder. It appeared as it were from another world, a metal block the size of a cigarette package, polished, with razor sharp edges. It reflected the blue of the ceiling against the light blue fabric of my towel, on which it lay, giving the appearance as though it was translucent in one direction. I leaned over the edge of the Jacuzzi to have another look. It had come into view while my eyes had wondered through clouds of steam rising from the water, boiling with millions of bubbles that burst into a fine spray adding a shade of mystery to the fantasy worlds of my waking dreams. Seeing the object had startled me. It seemed real, but it didn't fit. How did it get into the pool area, and who had put it onto my towel? I looked around. There was no one in the pool area with me. I decided that I would ignore it as an image conjured up by an over worked mind. Under normal circumstances I might have reached for it, handled it, examined it for its texture, weight, or what ring it might have, had not every bone in my body ached. Instead, I let myself slip deeper into the hot water and convinced myself that there wasn't really anything there. It felt good doing that, since it saved me the task of finding rationality for the irrational. In a way, this reflected my battles with the captain. The very hall still 'echoed' his violent shouts so undignified for a captain, reminiscent to scenes from old Nazi movies. He was determined to break my "affair" with Natalia, as he defined this honest response to the deepe feelings of two human beings to each other. He fought a psychological war, interlaced with meaningless medleys on the subject of marriage, morality, the importance of our mission, and his dream of having absolute authority over his crew. "You are morally bankrupt!" he would yell at me. "And you're bankrupt as a human being!" I would reply in the best civil fashion I could muster. As a rule, I submitted to such shouting matches only in private. I had learned to ignore his attacks at other occasions as some incurable madness from another world or another time. Apart from this special madness the captain was a likable fellow. So I decided to be cautious and ignore whatever I couldn't deal with, to keep the rest alive. It seemed the sensible thing to do. Seeing the metal object on my towel was like a parallel situation. It seemed that I could only deal with it by ignoring it. As I slipped deeper into the Jacuzzi until its hot water covered my head. I felt a great peace. Indeed, that appeared to be the right method of treating a puzzle like that. For twenty hours, I and scores of others had struggled deep inside the ship, in 'the pit' as we called the physical plant, which had become an arena of a life and death drama. Everything we had set out to accomplish with this mission, to say nothing of our own lives, had depended on the success of our work in the pit. And by goalie, we had won this fight! We had won it hands down, and I had played a central role in this titanic struggle. It had started routinely three days ago with a siren call that sounded no different than any of the nightly calls to the bridge, generated by a computer randomized program to test our emergency responses. I noticed that it was three AM exactly, when the emergency signal woke me. Half in a daze I rushed to the bridge, since everyone's arrival is timed during tests. Only this wasn't a test. Something was going on. Every person who had any responsibility for the mission was there. The deep space navigation officer, the logistics officer, the power systems officer, the mathematical systems officer.... Everyone was in a state of confused excitement. The ship's power monitoring system had detected a phase shift fluctuation, I was told. And not just one, but two of the ship's five generators were malfunctioning in this fashion. When I came to the bridge, nobody knew for certain what it all meant. A third generator had begun to indicate the same failure just as I walked in. || - page index - || - chapter index - || - Exit - ||
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