Captain Confused
Nov 27, 2022 16:58:54 GMT -5
Post by Radrook Admin on Nov 27, 2022 16:58:54 GMT -5
Captain Confused
by
Radrook
by
Radrook
Mikhail Yakovitch, the Russian eighty-five-year-old, interstellar ship captain, had suddenly been awakened from suspended animation, and found himself staring at a slowly pulsating grayness on cockpit viewing screen instead of the familiar darkness interspersed with stars.
After recovering from the initial shock, he sat in the navigator’s seat, and attempted to divert the ship away from the grayness directly ahead, but the ship remained on course. Fear began to set in. Although he had always resented being under chemically-induced suspended-animation, and considered it a total waste of the limited time, now, overcome by intense fear of the unknown, and the inexplicable, he would have preferred to have been dreaming, or at the least hallucinating within his hibernation enclosure.
Again he stood staring at the screen with incredulous eyes. What exactly had gone wrong? Where, in the name of God, were they? Once again he attempted to steer the ship away from its trajectory, but it only shuddered slightly as if it had been pre programmed to resist any such interference. Or was it some exterior force related to that mysterious endless grayness that was causing the anomaly? This last possibility made him attempt it once more. This time the ship's computer warned of an imminent detonation if he continued tampering. That warning instantly forced him to stop.
Outside, directly ahead, the enigmatic fear-inspiring, pulsating grayness remained steady, extending seemingly infinitely in all directions, around the ship, like some great gargantuan creature that had enveloped it as they had lain totally unaware in deep slumber, and was now slowly digesting it at its own leisure as if some gigantic space amoeba. He flinched at those macabre thought.
Suddenly he envied the crew-members who were remaining oblivious to the situation. Why was he being made an exception? Why had he been the one awakened prematurely? Perhaps he should return to suspended animation capsule and set the awakening time to ten years to see what happened. Maybe then the exterior grayness would have disappeared, and he could once more calmly observe the familiar and seemingly-infinite blackness of space interspersed with its endless numbers of beautiful galaxies.
Even senselessness, or death was preferable to the intense fear that he was beginning experience. Why was he being tormented in this way? What had he ever done to deserve it? Why couldn’t he simply just cease to exist in one swift termination of all sensations instead of this prolonged agony?
At a far corner of the ship, recessed into the ship’s bulkhead, his empty hibernation cubicle seemed to beckon him with its enticing flickering panel of lights. Yet, despite his aversion, the grayness, enthralled his scientific curiosity. So he considered leaving the rest of the crew under suspended animation during his investigation. After all, that would spare them the psychological agonies that he was undergoing.
For a very brief moment, he hesitated. Wasn’t it his professional duty as captain to awaken them? As their captain, wouldn’t they expect him to? Wasn’t it his duty to let them know the truth, no matter how bitter that truth might be? To reveal to them that they had traveled off course and were now surrounded by an inexplicable phenomenon for which he had absolutely no explanation?
But wouldn’t they curse him for disturbing their peace? Wouldn’t they suspect him of lacking empathy and compassion and of only wishing to inflict his own personal misery on them? Yes, he knew that would be the their reaction because that is a the way that he himself would react.
So finally, impelled by what he considered to have been his moral obligation, he forced his hand away from the control-panel's input that would have initiated the crew-awakening-process. The ship was now totally engulfed and the flickering remnants of stars he could still barely detect were rapidly fading into oblivion. Soon, in a couple of very brief moments, those very few comforting dim reminders of a familiar reality, would also be gone and only the grayness would remain.
Only him, and the unaware slumbering crew, the exterior grayness and the ship, and nothing more. The darkness that he had imagined interminable would then become what it had been all along, a mere microscopic speck, some type of anomaly, that had briefly interrupted real essence of ultimate reality. All that had preceded the grayness would eventually become a fleeting memory that would grow dimmer until totally forgotten as are all unpleasant dreams that tend to disturb the human mind.
He breathed in the ship’s recycled air deeply, and leaned back in his plush captain’s seat before the viewing screen. Strange how there was no sensation of movement although the instrument panel indicated warp 12. But wait just a minute! Should there be? Wasn’t this totally normal for ships in warp drive? Then he finally began to gradually recall the long and tediously meticulous instructions, the countless hours of lectures and tests and arduous training that had been necessary in order for him to qualify as captain of an interstellar warp-drive ship, despite his very advanced age. All was becoming clear now. How could he have so completely forgotten such simple and basic things?
Then suddenly, the ship shuddered slightly the grayness vanished, and the universe resumed its former appearance. To his astonishment, the rest of the crew gradually began to emerge from their chemically-induced hibernation as he stood baffled staring at each one.
“Say Captain, you look a little green around the gills,” his second-in-command, a young man 28 years of age asked after emerging from hibernation and finding the captain gaping at them in an unusual way.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“No, nothing is wrong. Everything is perfectly fine!” he lied as his second in command gazed at him suspiciously.