The Death of Sleep Read online

  Lunzie waved away the thought that he had insulted her courage. She suspected that he was unwilling to expose himself to the undomed surface of a planet. Agoraphobia was an insidious complaint. The free atmosphere would remind him too much of free space. He needed to be reassured that, like his memories, his courage was still there, and intact. "Never mind. But please, call me Lunzie. When you say 'Doctor Mespil,' I start to look around for my husband. And that contract ended years ago. Friendly parting, of course."

  The miner laughed, at his ease. Lunzie examined the flush-set desk computer screen, which displayed Jilet's medical file. His anger would have to be talked out. The escape capsule in which he'd cold-slept had had another minor malfunction that left him staring drugged and half conscious through the port glass at open space for two days before the cryogenic process had kicked in. Not surprisingly, that would contribute to the agoraphobia. There was a pathetic air of desperation about this big strong human, whose palpable dread was crippling him, impairing his usefulness. She wondered if teaching him rudimentary Discipline would help him, then decided against it. He didn't need to know how to control an adrenaline rush; he needed to learn how to keep them from happening. "Tell me how the fears start."

  "It's not so bad in the morning," Jilet began. "I'm too busy with my job. Ever been on the mining platform?" Lunzie shook her head. The corners of Jilet's dark eyes crinkled merrily. "You've a lot to look forward to, then, haven't you? I hope you can take a joke or two. .The boys are full of them. Don't get to liking this big office too much. Space is tight in the living quarters, so everyone gets to be tolerant of everyone else real fast. Oh, it's not like we're all mates right away," he added sadly. "A lot of the young ones first coming along die quickly. It only takes one mistake . . . and there you are, frozen or suffocated, or worse. A lot of them leave young families, too."

  Lunzie gulped, thinking of Fiona, and felt her heart twist in her body. She knew the seals and panels of her atmosphere suit were whole and taut, but she vowed to scrutinize them carefully as soon as Jilet left. "What are your specific duties?"

  "We all take turns at whatever needs doing, ma'am. I've got a knack for finding lucky strikes when I'm on scout duty, so I try to draw that one a lot. There's a bonus for a good find."

  "Maybe you're the one I'll pay to make my daughter's fortune for her," Lunzie smiled.

  "I'd be proud to have your trust, D—Lunzie, only why don't you see if I can cut it, eh? Well, every asteroid's got ore, large and small, but you don't waste your time on everything you see. The sensors in a scout are unidirectional. Once you've eyeballed something you like the look of, either on visual or in the navigational scanning net, you can get a detailed readout of the asteroid's makeup. Scouts aren't big. They're fit for one man only, so he'd better like being by himself for days or weeks, even months, at a time. It's not easy. You've got to be able to wake up cold-eyed if the scanner net alarm goes off to avoid collisions. When you find a potential strike, you lay claim to it on behalf of the company, pending computer search for other claims of ownership. If it's small, like a crystal mass, you can haul it back behind you to the platform—and you'll want to: there's always a bonus on crystals. You don't want anyone jumping claim behind you. The mediums can be brought in by a tug. The big ones a crew comes out to mine on the spot. I don't mind being in a scout, because I'm looking straight down the 'corridor' between fields in the net, and the inside of the ship is small enough to be comfortable. It starts to bug me when I'm fixing one of the rotating tumbling shafts, or something like that out in free-fall." Jilet finished with his brows drawn down and his arms folded tightly across his chest.

  "Focus on the equipment, Jilet. Don't catch yourself staring off into space. It was always there before. You just didn't pay attention to it then. Don't let it haunt you now. What matters is what you are working on at the moment." Lunzie hastened to calm him. She wanted him to verbalize the good facets of his job. It was impossible to heal the mind without giving it something positive to hang on to, a reason for healing. Half the battle was won, whether Jilet knew it or not. He had the guts to go back to his post on the Mining Platform. Getting back on the horse that threw him. "What do you look for when you're scouting?"

  Jilet's body gradually relaxed, and he studied the ceiling through his wiry black eyebrows. "What I can find. Depending on what's claiming a good price dirtside, you'll see 'em breaking down space rock into everything from diamonds to cobalt to iron. If the handling don't matter, they slag it apart with lasers and shove it into the tumbling chutes for processing. If how it's handled makes a difference, a prize crew'll strip it down. As much as possible is done in vacuum, for safety, conservation of oxygen, and to keep the material from expanding and contracting from exposure to too many temperatures. Makes the ore tough to ship if it has been thawed once. It'll split up, explode into a million shards if it warms too quickly. I've seen mates of mine killed that way. It's ugly, ma'am. I don't want to die in bed, but I'd rather not go that way, either."

  With a rueful smile for her precise clinical imagination, Lunzie dismissed thoughts of trying to reconstruct a splintered miner's body. This was the life she was moving toward, at just under the speed of light. You won't be able to save every patient, you idealist. Help the ones you can. "What's a crystal strike look like? How do you find one?"

  "Think I'd give all my secrets away, even to a friendly mindbrowser like you?" Jilet tilted one eyebrow toward her. Lunzie gave him an affable grin. "Well, I'll give you one clue. They're lighter than the others on the inside. Sounding gives you a cross-section that seems to be nearly hollow, bounces your scan around its interior. Sometimes it is. Why, I had one that split my beam up in a hundred different directions. The crew found it was rutilated with filaments of metal when they cut it apart. Worthless for communications, but some rich senator had it used for the walls of his house." Jilet spat in the direction of the nameless statesman.

  They were getting off the track. Regretfully, for Jilet was really relaxing with her, Lunzie set them back on it. "You've also complained of sleeplessness. Tell me about it."

  Jilet fidgeted, bent forward and squeezed his forehead with both hands. "It's not that I can't sleep. I—just don't want to fall asleep. I'm afraid that if I do, I won't wake up."

  "'Sleep, the brother of Death,'" Lunzie quoted. "Homer, or more recently, Daniel."

  "Yes, that's it. I wish—I wish that if I wasn't going to die they'd've left me asleep for a hundred years or more, so that I'd come back a complete stranger, instead of everything seeming the same," Jilet exploded in a sudden passionate outburst that surprised even him. "After only a dozen years I'm out of step. I remember things my friends have forgotten long since, that they laugh at me for, but it's all I've got to hang on to. They've had a decade to go on without me. They're older now. I'm a freak to them, being younger. I almost wish I had died."

  "Now, now. Death is never as good as its press would have you believe. You've begun making new friends in your profession, you're heading toward a job right now that makes the best use of your talents, and you can learn some new techniques that didn't exist when you started out mining. Give the positive aspects a chance. Don't think of space while you're trying to sleep. Let your mind turn inward, possibly to a memory of your childhood that you enjoyed." A chime sounded, indicating Jilet's personal time was at an end, and he needed to get back to his duties. Lunzie stood up, waited for Jilet to rise. He towered easily a third of a meter over her. "Come back and talk to me again next rest period," Lunzie insisted. "I want to hear more about crystal mining."

  "You and half the youngsters that come out to the Platforms," Jilet complained good-naturedly. "But, Doctor, I mean Lunzie, how can I get to sleep without having this eating away at me? We're still so far out, but the feelings are keeping me awake all over again."

  "I'd rather not give you drugs, though I will if you insist after you try it my way first. For now, concentrate on what is here, close by and around you. When you're in
the rec area, never look out the window, always at the wall beside it," Lunzie smiled, reaching out to press Jilet's hand warmly. "In no time, you'll be so bored with the wall that mere yearning for something new will set you to gazing at the stars again."

  After Jilet left, Lunzie got a carafe of fresh hot coffee for herself from a synthesizer hatch in the corridor, and returned to her office. While her observations on Jilet's case were still fresh in her mind, she sat down at her desk to key in data to her confidential files. She believed that in time he would recover completely. He'd obviously been counseled by experts when he first came out of cold sleep. Whoever the psychology team was that had worked with him, they were right on the ball when it came to rehabilitation counseling.

  Jilet's agoraphobia had been triggered by an occupational hazard. Lunzie wondered uneasily how many latent agoraphobics there were in space who simply hadn't been exposed to the correct stimuli yet that would cause it to manifest. Others in the crew could be on the edge of a breakout. Had anyone else shown symptoms?

  Immediately, Lunzie put the thought away. Wryly, she decided she was frightening herself. "I'll have to treat myself for paranoia soon, if I'm not careful." But the feeling of uneasiness persisted. Not for the first time, Lunzie wished that Fiona was here to talk to. She had always discussed things with Fiona, even when she was an infant. Lunzie turned the hologram in her hands. The girl was growing and changing. She was already as tall as her mother. "She'll be a woman when I get back." Lunzie decided that her dissatisfaction was because she was spoiling for a good chat with someone. Her remote cubicle was too lonely. Since "office hours" were over, she would run down the corridor to the rec area and see if anyone else was on break.

  Abruptly, Lunzie realized that the everpresent hum of the engine had changed, sped up. Instead of the usual purr, the sound had an edge of panic to it. Two more growling notes coughed to life, increasing the vibration so much Lunzie's teeth were chattering. They were trying to fire up the dorsal and ventral engines!

  "Attention, all personnel," Captain Cosimo's voice blared. "This is an emergency alert. We are in danger of collision with unknown objects. Be prepared to evacuate. Do not panic. Proceed in an orderly fashion to your stations. We are attempting to evade, but we might not make it. This is not a drill."

  Lunzie's eyes widened, and she turned to her desk screen. On the computer pickup, the automatic cutoff devolved to forward control video, and showed what the pilot on the bridge saw: half a dozen irregularly shaped asteroids. Two that appeared to be the size of the ship were closing in from either side like pincers, or hammer and anvil, with more fragments heading directly for them. There wasn't room for the giant ship, running on only one of its three engines, to maneuver and avoid them all. Normally, asteroid routes could be charted. The ship's flight plan took into account all the space-borne debris to be avoided. At the last check, the route had been clear. These must have just crashed into one another, changing their course abruptly into the path of the Nellie Mine. The huge freighter 'was incapable of making swift turns, and there was no way to get out of the path of all the fragments. Collision with the tumbling rocks was imminent.

  One of the asteroids slipped out of view of the remote cameras, and Lunzie was thrown out of her chair as the huge ship fired all its starboard boosters, attempting to avoid collision. Crashing sounds reverberated through the corridor, and the floor shook. Some of the smaller fragments must have struck the ship.

  The red alert beacons in the corridor went off. "Evacuate!" the captain's voice shouted. "We can't get the engines firing. All personnel, evacuate!"

  As the klaxon sounded, Lunzie's mind reached for Discipline. She willed herself to be calm, recalling all her training on what to do in a red alert. The list scrolled up in her mind as clearly as it would do on a computer screen. Make sure all who are disabled or too young to look after themselves are safe, then secure yourself—but most importantly, waste no time! Lunzie paused only long enough to grab Fiona's hologram off the desk and stow it in a pocket before she dashed out into the corridor, heading for her section's escape capsule.

  The crew section was a curved strip one level high across the equator of the spherical freighter. When the ship was making a delivery run, she could carry as many as eighty crew in the twenty small sleeping cubicles, ten on either side of the common rooms. At intervals along the corridor, round hatchways opened onto permanently moored escape capsules. Lunzie's office was at the far left end of the crew section.

  The ship rocked. They'd been struck again, this time by a big fragment. There was a gasp of life support fans and compressors speeding up to move the air in spite of a hull breach. All the lights in the corridor went out, and in the center of one wall, a circle of bright red LEDs chased around the hatch of the escape capsule, which irised open as Lunzie ran toward it.

  She waited at the hatch, staring down the long corridor toward the center of the crew section to see if anyone was coming to board this escape shuttle with her. Her heart hammered with fear and impatience. The capsule iris would close and launch automatically thirty seconds after a body entered the hatchway, so she forced herself to wait. Lunzie wanted to be certain that there was no one else in this section that she would be abandoning if she took off alone in the capsule.

  There was a deafening bang, and then a roar like thunder echoed in the corridor. A section of rock the size of her head burst through the bulkhead less than a hundred feet down the passage, cutting her off from the rest of the crew. Lunzie ducked the splinters, and grabbed with both hands at the edge of the hatchway, as the vacuum of space dragged the ship's atmosphere out through the tear in the hull. Gritting her teeth tightly, she clung to the metal lip, and watched furniture, clothing, coffee cups, atmosphere suits fly through the air toward the gap. The air dropped to near freezing, and frost formed swiftly on her rings and sleeve fasteners, and on her eyelashes, cheeks and lips. Her hands were growing numb with cold. Lunzie wasn't sure how long she could hang on before she, too, was sucked out into space through that hole. This was death, she knew. Then: a miracle.

  She heard a rending sound, and her desk and chair flew out of her office door, ricocheted off the opposite corridor wall with individual bangs, and collided in the tear in the hull. The tornadic winds died momentarily, blocked by her office furniture. Lunzie grabbed the opportunity to save herself. She dove through the hatchway headfirst, tucking and rolling to land unhurt between the rows of impact seats. She arched up from the floor to punch the manual door control with her fist, then crawled to the steering controls, not bothering to right herself before sending the pod hurtling into space.

  The capsule spun away from the side of the Nellie Mine. Lunzie was flung about in the tiny cabin. She caught hold of the handloops, yanked herself into the pilot's seat and strapped in.

  The lumpy shape of the mining ship looked like another asteroid against the curtain of stars. The brief strip of living space raised across a 60 degree arc of the ship's midsection bloomed with other pinpoints of light as the rest of the crew evacuated in vessels like hers. She regretted that there hadn't been opportunity for anyone else to join her in the escape pod, company until rescue could reach them, but Space! when the alarm sounds, you go, or you die.

  She could see where the gigantic asteroid had struck the Nellie. It had torn away a large section of the crew quarters at the opposite end of the strip from hers, creased the hull deeply, and sailed away on a tangential course. The second asteroid, the size of a moon, would do far more damage. The ship, still on automatic pilot, was slowly turning toward her, firing on all the steering thrusters down one side, so the jagged rock would take it broadside instead of a direct strike. She watched, fascinated and horrified, as the two immense bodies met, and melded.

  Her little pod hurtled outward at ever-increasing speed, but much faster still came the explosion, the overtaxed inner engine kicking through the plating behind the living quarters, imploding the shells and then kicking the debris forward of the direc
tionless hulk. Pieces of red-hot hull plating shot past her, some missing her small boat by mere yards. The planetoid deflected away, its course changed only slightly.

  Lunzie let go of the breath she had been holding. The disaster had happened so quickly. Only minutes had gone by since the alert was broadcast. Her Discipline had served her well—she had acted swiftly and decisively. She was considered by her masters a natural Candidate, who had already achieved much on her own. Basic training in Discipline was recommended for medics and Fleet officers of command rank and above, especially those who would be going into hazardous situations—much like this. Over the years, Lunzie had achieved Adept status. It was a pity she hadn't been able to go on with her lessons since reaching Tau Ceti. Lunzie was grateful for the instruction, which had probably saved her life, but she realized that her capsule was still at least two weeks travel away from the Mining Platform. She switched on the communication set and leaned over the audio pickup.

  "Mayday, Mayday. This is Nellie Mine Shuttle, registration number NM-EC-02. I repeat, Mayday."

  A wave of static poured out of the speaker. Underneath it, she could hear a voice. The static gradually died, and a man's voice spoke clearly. "I hear you, EC-02. This is Captain Cosimo, in EC-04. Is that you, Lunzie?"

  "Yes, sir. Is everyone else all right?"

  "Yes, dammit. All present and accounted for but you. We thought we'd lost you when Damage Control reported a punchthrough in your wing. That was one hell of a bang. I knew it would happen one day. Poor old Nellie. Are you all right?"

  "I'm fine."

  "Good. We've been signaling, but there's no one in immediate range. Before the blast, we sent off a message to Descartes 6 advising them to send someone out for us. Lock in your beacon to 34.8 and activate."