Devon was sitting in a huge, ornate throne that seemed to fill a very strange, very massive chamber covered in ornate drawings and strange lights of red and blue and purple. It felt like you could put a basketball court in the space and still leave room for a lot of spectators around the edges.
He was wearing the same clothes he had been wearing on the communications link.
And he was the only one in the chamber besides me.
I stood there, staring, trying to grasp what I was seeing, but my mind felt numb.
Nothing made sense, nothing felt right. Even the air smelled of great age, not burnt wires.
“Sorry it took so long, buddy,” he said, smiling. “We had to make sure the situation really was as bad as it seemed.”
“I’m dead. It doesn’t get any worse.”
My voice sounded just damn silly and was swallowed like so much silence in the massive chamber.
“To the rest of the world, yes.” Devon said. “The Klondike, in about two minutes, will be completely destroyed by the impact from a four-meter wide asteroid.”
“But…?”
I stared around, trying to figure out a pattern in the strange lights, then back at Devon, the pitiful question sort of hanging there.
“But what’s all this?” Devon asked, indicating the vast chamber around us. “This is the Peace-Maker, on loan to us for missions like this from the aliens everyone in the tabloids refer to as the Grays.”
I nodded. “Now I know I’m dead. Or being gassed by some environmental leak.”
“Well, this is the future we always wanted,” Devon said, laughing. “Remember as kids how we used to dream about going to the moon, going to Mars, exploring out here and beyond? And finding friendly aliens to help us along the way? Well, they found us.”
“ Roswell?” I asked, shaking my head at the stupidity of my question.
“Actually far before that. Roswell was just an accident with one of their small training ships as we were trying to learn how to fly them.”
“Come on, Ben,” I said to myself. “Wake up. You’ve got to wake up, check the gas levels. You’re hallucinating.”
“Yeah, I didn’t believe it either,” Devon said. “But the truth is, you’re alive, but to everyone else, you are officially dead and you can no longer show yourself to anyone. You’ll either live and work at Area 51 or on the base on Titan.”
“Titan? We have a base on Titan?”
“Actually, the Grays do, and they let us use parts of it. The Grays will be returning for their next visit to our system in twenty-three years, and we’d like to impress them with our progress. You’re going to be a great help to us. We need some experienced test pilots for some new deep spacecraft we’re testing.”
I wanted to slap myself, but didn’t. This was one hell of a hallucination for a dying person.
Devon reached out and touched something in the blank air in front of him, and half the wall to my right vanished, showing me the blackness of space and the Klondike floating there. I could see the extensive damage from the two impacts. For such a proud ship, it looked very, very sad and small and helpless.
“Coming in from the right,” Devon said, his voice clearly upset by what was happening and what had happened to the rest of the crew.
I stood there, transfixed, watching what I was sure was my own death as the shadow seemed to appear out of nowhere suddenly, then smashed into the Klondike, ripping it apart and sending pieces swirling off in many different directions.
“You are now officially dead,” Devon said, his voice soft. “I just wish I had gotten here in time to save the others from real death as well. But we thought the repair plan would work.”
I stared at him, my mind still not grasping this, but I had one question that just pissed me off if anything about this dream was real.
“How come, if we have this, we let people like me go out into space on ships like that? How come we let them die?”
“Because we have to,” Devon said. “The Grays only lent us this one ship. We have to fight our own way out into space, prove that we can survive out here, that we belong out here, and that takes growth and sacrifice. We have to pay the price.”
“Five good men just paid a very heavy price,” I said, disgusted.
“Yes, they did,” Devon said. “And all six of you will have your names on the memorial in ten days, in a very large and impressive service. But what you learned out here won’t go to waste. As you discovered, there are vast riches out here, more than enough to keep the space program going for another hundred years, until we finally figure out how to reach the stars and find even greater riches.”
I glanced down, suddenly realizing my feet weren’t sticking to the floor.
“Artificial gravity?”
Devon nodded. “We don’t know how it works, but we know it exists and is possible, so there are a thousand scientists around the planet working on it in different ways.”
“You came from Earth?” I asked.
Again he nodded. “I was beamed aboard the ship where we keep it parked in a hidden orbit, and I flew it here to get you.”
“That’s one fast trip. It took us two months.”
“Some sort of dimensional jump engine,” Devon said. “Way beyond us so far.”
“Why you?” I asked.
“Mission Control figured I would be the best one to do the rescue since you were going to have trouble believing all this was real.”
“No kidding,” I said. “I’m still not.”
“I don’t blame you,” Devon said.
I walked over to the wall that seemed to be open to space and touched it. I could feel a warm, almost soft metal, even though it looked like I could stick my hand all the way out into the vacuum.
“We don’t know what that material is either, or even how it works.”
“But I bet we’re working on it,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, we are, but we haven’t even figured out how to analyze it yet, let alone reproduce it.”
“And you say this is the only ship they lent us?”
Devon nodded. “I wish we had more. That way we could shadow all the different missions going on in space, save more lives.”
I remembered my five crewmates who had just died ugly deaths. “Yeah, too bad.” The disgust and anger was clear in my voice.
Then I remembered Tammie. She was going to think I was dead.
“Can I take Tammie with me to wherever I’m going next?”
Devon shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Only very specific people can know this exists. No families allowed. Besides, you need her to keep up your legacy of what you did.”
I nodded. Tammie had always been the perfect astronaut’s wife. She would make sure my memory stayed alive and that my death wouldn’t be in vain.
“Can I at least say goodbye?”
Devon looked like I had just trapped him bluffing in a poker game. I knew that look. There was something he didn’t want to tell me.
“There is a way, isn’t there?”
He nodded slowly. “We’ve worked out a way that you can say goodbye.”
Devon ’s hands flew through the air in front of him, seemingly touching and brushing different things that I couldn’t see.
Suddenly, outside the ship, the stars seemed to blur for a moment. Then at the next instant, we were in orbit around Earth. There had been no feeling at all of movement.
I had to be dead. What had just happened wasn’t possible. That was all there was to it. I had just traveled the same distance it had taken me two months before to travel, and all in a fraction of a second without feeling a thing. Dead people traveled like that, not live ones.
“We’re above the Phoenix area,” Devon said. “The Grays have this nifty device they showed us how to use that transports you to a place where you can hear and see and talk to people, but not actually be there. You’ll stay here on the ship the entire time.”
“Like a projected hologram?”
He nodded.
“And Tammie will be able to see me?”
“As a sort of ghostlike figure. If you tell her you’re dead and just came to say goodbye, she’ll believe you, especially when you vanish. But it’s going to scare the hell out of her.”