Ghost by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780812520880
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 1986-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

* * *

Now the clock was coming down on 10-a bare one million years per hour. The two gassed crewmen had slept out their human hours as the velocity wound down at the same rate it had increased, one clock hour per human hour.

They were not returning to their own time, however. The reversal of the drive merely slowed their thrust into the future, much as a breaking action in physical space would operate. The second face of the clock continued to mark off the cumulative time traveled. At zero on the right-hand clock, the Meg would be stationary in time-moving forward at the precise rate of Earth-normal. But the ship and crew would be sitting several quadrillion years in the future. Then the acceleration backward could commence, followed by deceleration backward, until at last the Meg II guided in along the beacon to the precise time spot it should have occupied had its human hours been taken straight. Thus no paradox, no misalignment with normal Earth.

They were still moving toward that rendezvous with oblivion: what they should have passed at the twenty-second hour of acceleration. They had not intersected it yet because of the tremendous difference the logarithmic scale made, where the last three-tenths of an hour from 21.7 to 22.0 amounted to more actual travel than in all the first twenty hours.

Shetland stood behind the pilot, pretending that nothing had happened. Of course Shetland himself had reversed the drive, after shooting down the pilot for urging that very action-but that was the Captain's prerogative.

"Captain," Johns said, not looking around. There was nothing that required his immediate attention; the drive ran itself, and the pilot was on duty merely to watch the gauges and make sure there was no hitch developing. "Captain-I request permission to say something."

What was there for this man to say? That he resented having been gassed for voicing an opinion less than two hours before its time?

"Speak," Shetland said.

"Captain, I just wanted to apologize. I don't know what came over me. I never lost my head like that before. I don't believe in ghosts. I just-somehow I couldn't-what I mean is, you did the only thing you could do, when you faced something-something very like-" He swallowed. "Like mutiny. And I can see that you were right all the time. I'm sorry I forgot."

Johns was apologizing for his own disorientation, engendered by temporal velocity. That effect had not been his fault-and Shetland himself had suffered from it similarly.

"We were all a little on edge," Shetland said, discovering that his dislike of the pilot was becoming tenuous. Was there any point in trying to explain? "There is no record of any- thing like mutiny."

"Yes, sir." This time those ordinary words carried a freighting of extraordinary gratitude.

He looked at the main clock. 9.88, going down. Almost twelve hours of deceleration; almost ten more to go. Then what? Things had settled in so quietly, after the excitement of the acceleration.

9.85. Only when they came to a dead halt relative to their starting point could they safely release the drive and rest in space.

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