The capsule was swinging slightly from side to side, the crate probably being hoisted by a crane. The mild shifting of his weight from left to right was nauseating. Time to sleep. He repeated the rhythm, the cycles, the one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten to himself. He took a deep breath from the mixture that smelled somewhat like leaves raked in a pile, and slept.
A dream came. He was in a room lying on a bed. The walls and the ceiling were covered with maps, maps of the world, maps of countries and oceans and cities. Directly above him was the almost-square map of New Mexico. The squiggles of roads on the map were unrecognizable. Then, as if she were in zero-gravity, his mother crawled along the ceiling. She wore a robe and her hair was in curlers, just the way she always looked in the kitchen in the morning when she prepared breakfast for him and his father. His mother reached toward the New Mexico map, pointing, smiling at him, falling atop him, her body spreading across him, pinning him in so he could not move. Dark even when he opened his eyes. His breathing restricted.
But when he was able to lift his arms and touch the mask over his mouth and nose, he knew where he was. The capsule, awakened from the sleep by the dream. He knew where he was, yet he did not know. The crate with the capsule inside could be anywhere. A warehouse, or perhaps already at the silo awaiting his tour of duty.
The dream. Some of it real. His room as a boy adorned with maps. But not his mother crawling on the ceiling. She would be in the kitchen calling him. “Come eat, Donnie. I made waffles, Donnie. Where are you this morning? In Africa? In South America? At the South Pole?”
She would come and sit on the edge of the bed so that it would sway to one side. “You’ve slept enough, Donnie.” She would touch his arm and when she went back to the kitchen the bed would sway back again, righting itself.
When Donovan opened and closed his eyes there was no change in the pure blackness of his capsule. If he were yet unborn would it be like this? Was it like this? As a fetus had he awakened in the womb of the mother he never knew? He knew he was adopted when he was very young. His adoptive parents believed in the truth above all, even to the point of being unable to fulfill genuine parental love and admitting it. “We love you almost as much as if you were our own son,” said the father one warm afternoon on a visit to the city zoo while they threw protein pebbles to the sad-eyed apes in their clean and tidy cages. After college he never saw his adoptive parents again. To Donovan the terms father and mother were simply descriptive names given to the man and woman who had raised him.
The capsule seemed to be swaying slightly as it had when he succumbed to sleep. But there was a difference. Instead of a side to side with a mild downward pressure as if swinging from a crane, the side to side was as if atop a pole or on the bed, his mother coming in again and again, trying to awaken him. “Come eat, Donnie. I made waffles, Donnie.”
His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He gagged saliva up from the back of his throat, spread it throughout his mouth and onto his lips. He spoke aloud to check his voice and hearing.
“How long have you been asleep, Donovan?” His voice was muffled rudely by the mask, but he left the mask on in case there was a leak in the fluid or bowel elimination systems. “Where are you, Donovan? Is the rocking motion because you’re on a ship? If so it seems regular enough, a fairly smooth voyage. More likely you’re on a rocking machine designed to keep your body fluids moving. Down in the old silo on the old rocking machine.” He sang to the tune of “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” “Down in the old silo rockin’-machine, where I first met me.”
But where was that? Where could he place it on a map? If only he could see a map with a line tracing his journey, an X marking the destination. In the dream his mother had pointed to New Mexico, to the lower central region. Just north of the San Andres Range where he had been trained, where he had been packed like a sardine in his capsule. Mustard-colored fluids in bottles at the sides of the capsule. A sardine packed in mustard. Lord, he was hungry! Hungry for food and — and what? If only he knew where he was. Had they forgotten a phobia in training? And if there was a phobia for not knowing topographically where on earth he was, what was it called?
He tried to remember if, during his pre-training interviews, anyone had asked about his childhood fondness for maps, his desire to know exactly where he was. He could see the backs of his parents’ heads riding in the front seat of the car. Him in the back with his maps and a marker charting the exact position on the journey, at night using a flashlight. Vacations to him had not been valued for the arrival at a desirable destination. They had been an opportunity to chart the surface of a map and to glance out a window to verify the location.
After college he had joined the Air Force and taken every possible opportunity for travel. The farther the better, the less time spent in one place the better. A technician servicing defense systems around the globe.
He spoke aloud again. “So why are you here? Why did you volunteer for this? A year in one place and you won’t even know where you are. Utah? Nevada? North Dakota?”
The money. The eventual retirement to unlimited travel. The world would be his after the year in the silo. If only he could sleep the entire year in the silo.
He could feel his heartbeat. It was speeding up. Too fast. Must sleep. He took several deep breaths, closed his eyes, imagined a map of the country above him, a line on the map indicating his exact minute-to-minute position relative to the coasts, to cities, to lakes and rivers. Again, he slept.
“Good morning. Major Donovan? Up an’ at ’em, major.”
The light was blood-red. His heart felt like an engine running wild in his chest. Someone was lifting his legs, pulling them. Moisture touched his lips, and when he opened his mouth a soft wet probe entered him. The liquid was warm and sweet as he sucked on the probe. A dream?
He raised his hands toward his face and felt a touch of other flesh.
“Relax, major. You don’t want to wake up too fast.”
The ceiling was lined with pipes and wires painted red. He stared at the intricacy of the ceiling, imagining that it was a map that would tell him where he was. He was certain he had slept a long time. Coming awake during training and even the two or three times he had come awake inside the capsule never felt like this. A baby fresh from the womb. The sweet liquid he suckled spread a pleasant, triumphant warmth throughout his body. Then he began to itch all over.
Captain Lacy had a full beard and spoke quite softly. “My voice doesn’t echo off the walls this way,” said Captain Lacy. “I’ll get used to speaking in a normal voice as soon as I get on the outside. And you, major, will begin speaking softly like the rest of us. It comes with the job.”
“Where are the others?”
“In their quarters with their sponsors. They’ve found that it’s easier to get acclimated this way. Each of us short-timers spends the first few hours with his replacement.”