The Young Dictator by Hughes Rhys

Author:Hughes, Rhys [Hughes, Rhys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pillar International Publishing
Published: 2013-10-23T20:00:00+00:00

Jenny moved with increasing difficulty. Her skin was hardening more and more every day, acquiring a shiny surface like a crystal; and this surface was starting to become transparent, revealing a strange shape deep within, something bulky stirring in the centre of her being. She knew what it was and what it meant. Time was getting short.

It was the demon inside her and soon it would hatch!

She kept her midriff bare, so that she could check continually on what was happening through this body window.

But she also forced her mind to focus on the practicalities of flying the spaceship through a black hole. The nearest black hole to Bellatrix Three was six light years distant. She ordered the spaceship into hyperspace and issued commands to her navigator and pilot.

The journey was brief and comfortable.

Then the spaceship arrived on the edge of the black hole.

Jenny pressed her face to the porthole and whistled slowly through her teeth at the impressive sight of the collapsed star, a pit of nothingness that sucked in all matter and energy that came within its gravitational field. It was an utterly dark object but fringed with a froth of dancing light. There was a sudden lurch and she stumbled.

“Our craft has been caught by the black hole,” said the pilot with more than a little fear in his voice. He did his best to conceal his fear, as all the crew members did, but it was obvious.

“Don’t worry,” soothed Jenny. “Gran assured me that we can survive if we enter the black hole in the correct manner. We must aim for the very centre of the hole. Be prepared for some weird effects and please bear in mind that time and space are going to be playing tricks on you. Also you will be stretched as thin as feasible…”

“How thin is that?” asked the pilot.

“It means you’ll be stretched to the point where your body is nothing more than a line of molecules. You won’t have any width at all. You’ll be just length, pure length, like string.”

The pilot and navigator swallowed with difficulty.

“It’s called spaghettification,” Jenny added, “but once that part of the ordeal is pasta — I mean past — we’ll be fine. We’ll turn back into solid beings. At least I sincerely hope so!”

The spaceship lurched again. It was accelerating into the middle of the black hole, which was expanding and shutting out the stars on all sides. A series of alarms went off somewhere. Immense gravitational forces were stretching the ship and under ordinary circumstances the hull would have snapped into many tiny pieces. But…

Circumstances inside a black hole aren’t ordinary.

Far from it! They are bizarre.

Because the front end of the spaceship was nearer the black hole than the rear end, gravity pulled unequally on the vessel, stretching it. Because this stretching was equally distributed, the occupants inside didn’t notice it. To an outside observer, if there had been one, Jenny’s nose would have grown longer and longer and thinner and thinner,

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