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Seeing Natalia's face through the steam over the Jacuzzi and the comfort I derived from that was no doubt intertwined with this still ongoing adventure. She had never had occasion again to ask what it is like to be dead; tired maybe, but never dead.
But there was one thing that hurt deeply that day in the Jacuzzi, which hurt more than the pain of my aching muscles. It was a hurt that was hard to define that came from the general indifference I had witnessed to what had happened. It struck like a blow into the stomach.
When I emerged from the elevator on the seventeenth level, dirty like a chimney-sweep, no one took note of me. People passed by; some looked the other way. I stopped at the railing of the great atrium, looked down on the crowd that had gathered at the main floor. It was past shift change already. What struck me was that everything looked so damn terribly normal. People were waiting down there for the movie to start. Nobody had told them. Nobody knew that their life had hung in the balance as if it wasn't their business to be aware what is happening to their very existence.
Neither had the few people who had seen me, suspected anything. Wasn't anyone interested? Didn't anyone care? Were they all dead? Not a single person had stopped. No one had asked what had happened, why I was covered in grease and muck. Only Natalia seemed to care about what I might be feeling. She even went as far as taking her bathing suit top off for a suitable diversion. Or was this merely another move in the game we played with the captain? Or maybe it was both. At the moment I was too tired to reason this thing out further, to its very depth. I was content with the fact that she did it and was quite happy to be there with her in this fashion.
Our ship was without doubt the most advanced spacecraft ever built. Every conceivable comfort was provided for. The only conventional factor on ship, that had reduced the entire equation to something conventional, was the ship's obvious need for people. The captain himself, our Johnny, was the most conventional, not to say primitive factor of them all. He regarded himself as some supreme ruler of a mighty empire, sovereign even above the law on which his authority rested. In his mind, 'transact' means to conduct. He aimed to conduct the affairs of everyone around. Natalia and I had sat down with him many times, in an effort to reason with him from a platform of law. But who can reason with a captain who insists that he is right?
The existence of laws meant nothing to him, logic meant even less. As he saw it, Natalia and I violated a code of ethics, as both of us were married to different partners left behind. He became enraged over it. His little mind translated the world into black and white. How small his world must have been!
He called me to his office once and virtually pleaded with me for almost an hour to subject ourselves to his vision. He felt that everything the mission was designed to accomplish hinged on his perception of the moral integrity of every single crewmember aboard. I agreed with him on some points, but not with his interpretation as to what morality is, which he was determined to impose on everyone.
"Who told Einstein to invent the theory of relativity?" I asked him.
"No one did! But that's not the issue here!" he replied with a polite smile as though he was talking to children.
"Yes it is!" I told him. "That is indeed the issue here. Einstein had the universe before him. His horizon was not narrowed with limits. He was able to reach for the infinite, and what he discovered there was marvelous beyond measure. And our case covers exactly the same issue!"
Johnny shook his head; "How can I make you understand?"
"You obviously can't," I said, and simply walked out.
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