CHAPTER 1

 

Christine Zibbon-Smith briefly regains consciousness in an absolute blackness. She has no idea where she is or how she got here. Christine is lying on her back, on a warm silky material, with a tube fixed inside her mouth. Just for a few seconds, the thought of pod 256 flashes through her mind, but she speedily rejects this hypothesis. Christine's hands slide across her firm naked breasts then down her flat belly, until they touch a catheter. She idly wonders why this does not cause her to panic.

'Oh, dear, am I in hospital and full of drugs? What has happened?' ponders Christine, in a detached dreamlike state, before drifting off to sleep.

***

She reawakens with a raging thirst; now Christine panics. She yells,

"Where am I? Is anybody there?"

'Stay calm, girl. You are either ill or someone is playing with your mind yet again.' Christine concentrates upon this thought. She forces herself to breathe slowly and deeply, and then explores her environment with her hands. Christine prays that she is not blind, when she discovers that her eyes are unfettered. She shudders with agitated revulsion when she finds her anal catheter.

Christine quivers again, as she realises that her enveloping space resembles the interior of an oversized coffin. She struggles to remain focused, putting her hand over her own mouth to stifle a scream, trembling with disgust as she touches the tube in her mouth.

'This is not a coffin! There is no smell, so there is good ventilation. I must be full of painkillers, because I can hardly feel that pipe up my back passage. Somebody is doing this to me; I will lay still and silent and wait for them to make their move.'

Christine tests her painkiller hypothesis by pinching both nipples violently; she hardly feels the pain from her fingers. Christine's hands drift down between her legs, coming to rest on her clitoris. Her encapsulation seems strangely erotic, so she quickly frigs to orgasm. As there is nothing else to do, Christine keeps herself aroused for a second climax, then she relaxes. The hours pass slowly without any sign of another person. Again, Christine falls into a dreamless slumber.

***

This time Christine's awakening feels unreal, as if a never-ending nightmare that still entraps her.

'Hell, I have been run over by a steamroller! My arsehole is on fire and it stinks in here. How long have I been asleep?' Christine tries to shout out, but her throat is as dry as dust. Every muscle screams in agony and each joint feels twisted. The back of her head hurts, as though kicked. She pushes up against her tomb with her arms and legs, battling to escape, until finally collapsing back in desperate exhaustion.

In the absolute silence, Christine listens to her pounding heart and laboured breathing. She knows that her fatigue is partly due to the build up of carbon dioxide; knows that she needs to think clearly so she can find an escape. Christine practises the exercises that Dr Green had taught her, to lower her breathing, heart and metabolic rates. Christine knows that this will not be a good death.

'Is that a voice? Am I hallucinating? You bastard, Peder, you have come back to haunt me!' However, the faint crackly voice continues, sounding louder and more desperate. The message seems to be repeating. She finally realises the meaning of the distorted words,

"Christine, this is Dr Green, pull the lever in the corner by your left foot. ... Christine, this is Graham Green, please pull the lever, the one in the corner by your left foot. ... Christine, this is Dr Green, for god's sake, pull the sodding lever! It is in the corner by your left foot."

Using the last of her strength, Christine rips out her three tubes and painfully contorts her aching body. At last, Christine locates the smooth warm lever, but she does not have sufficient strength remaining to move it.

"Christine, this is Dr Green, pull the lever in the corner by your left foot! This is your last chance before we lose radio contact. Goodbye, Christine, you will be dead before you spin back into radio range. Sorry it did not work out. If you can still hear me, I love you Christine. For my sake, pull the lever in the ..."

On hearing the radio's static, with one desperate wrist-wrenching move, Christine tugs on this lever and the lid springs open. She pushes the heavy cover fully up and gulps down huge, revitalising, lungfuls of air.

As Christine surveys the horror of her surroundings and listens to the static on the radio, she starts to recall how she arrived in this precarious predicament. She shouts out, despite a dread that nobody can hear her words,

"I have just escaped from the frying pan into the fire. It is a pity that I will not live long enough to twist the balls off the man who decided to locate the escape lever at the wrong end!"

Christine fathoms out that she is inside a badly damaged space capsule. She gradually recalls Dr Green giving her an injection and warning her that she must expect some side effects, in several months time, when she awakes. Christine grabs a plastic water tube and drinks greedily.

'This is all wrong. The simulator had flashing lights and visual displays. Where are the crew?'

She rushes around in the gloom of the red emergency lighting, finds the other two reduced animation pods, notes that one is empty and opens up the lid of the other.

"God almighty! You poor sod!" Christine screeches at the sight of the skin and bone remains of, most probably, a man. She sobs as she inspects the silk lining that this man has ripped to shreds. Christine closes the lid.

'I am still in a nightmare,' she thinks, but continues searching, clambering over broken fittings and wiring. She remembers that a crew of two should be accompanying her and is relieved to find three space suits.

The capsule is almost spherical with a diameter of thirty feet, a rabbit warren of equipment and crawl ways. Even with the damage, it does not take her long to explore. Christine decides that she should eat, relax and rest, certain that there is a logical explanation for the missing person.

She finds the taste of a self-heating packet of beef stroganoff bland, but comforting. Some of her memories flood back, making her feel that everything will soon be fine. In the very nick of time, she recalls one of Dr Green's warnings: she must remove the internal part of her anal catheter before eating. Christine depresses the small, recessed button to deflate the device and pulls it out.

Christine thinks how stupid she was to have wondered if she was still in space, for the presence of gravity is obvious. In fact, her limbs feel too heavy. She shuts her eyes and reclines in a padded chair. Christine plays back her life in her mind; everything up to seeing Peder Piper's cryogenic pod seems to be consistent, but then only tiny flashes of unrelated memory. She resolves not to even try to fill in the blanks, but to wait for the voice on the radio. Christine finds that the sound of the radio's static is almost reassuring.

She opens her eyes, as a stray thought startles her back to full alertness,

'Maybe Peder has been repaired and resuscitated. Perhaps he is playing dirty tricks one more time!' Christine thinks. Then her eyes focus up onto the ceiling.

"No! No! No! Oh, no, this is a nightmare! God let me wake up!" Christine screams repeatedly, until she chokes. She sobs as she finds a hand torch and then clambers up towards the ceiling.

Christine has solved her mystery, for the stiff, cold, naked crew woman hangs downwards, suspended above with her face fixed into a pain-ridden scream. The deceased woman's arse is plugging a ragged hole in the capsule's superstructure. There are dried wounds where tender flesh joins jagged metal. Christine quickly looks away, clambers down and extinguishes the torch before speaking to the cadaver.

"Are you a brave woman who has saved my life? Did you plug that gap to save me? If so, thank you from the centre of my heart. If it was just an accident, well, thank you for that as well. You know that I cannot pull you down, but I will try to stay alive for long enough to tell your story."

Christine has no idea of time, no working visual displays and obviously no windows. She must stay near to the radio and hence cannot get away from this corpse. She has no method of determining how long the power for the radio will last, or if the solar panels are working or even if she is at the bottom of a deep shady ravine. All she can do is to wait and listen.

Christine has an uncanny, profoundly eerie, feeling that someone, or something, is watching her every move. She inwardly rants at Peder for the damage he has done to her mind, and curses herself that she still blames a dead man for every misadventure that she suffers.

***

Christine screams when the dead woman belches in the murk above. She reasons that this is a perfectly natural putrefaction process, but still Christine cannot stop shrieking. Before too long, the naked carcass belches the Morse code for the letter V, and Christine begins to laugh hysterically. She yells hysterically,

"You can stop decomposing now, Beethoven!" then she starts shrieking Ludwig's fifth Symphony at the top of her voice.

'Your circumstances could be worse, girl. Her arse is outside, wherever outside might be wrong,' reasons a remote part of Christine's mind.

"Why do you not all sing along with me?" she asks her hypothetical watchers.

***

This musical parody continues until Christine hears a rhythmic metallic knocking. She cannot even guess what it is or from where it originates, as it echoes throughout the capsule.

Her body becomes chilled; she doesn't know if this is from fear or a drop in the capsule's temperature. Before she can hunt through the debris for clothes, she hears a faint whistling noise above her head. This shrill noise grows steadily louder.

"I did not come all this way to be killed by an air leak!" Christine yells in defiance, clambering up to the corpse above with the torch and a tube of water.

"Sorry about the indignity, my dear," Christine whispers, as she splashes water around the sordid interface of flesh and metal above her head. Her intention is to locate the place where the air is escaping.

"No wonder I feel so cold," Christine states, with a new, matter of fact, confidence. The water drops freeze on contact with the capsule wall, blocking the escape of precious air. Unfortunately, the cold-water also splashes down onto her chilly naked skin and she starts quivering violently.

'Do not give up now, girl. You are not in danger until you stop shivering.' Christine warms her hands on a pack of self-heating chicken vindaloo, only releasing it when it becomes too hot to hold. She forces the meal down her throat, despite her lack of appetite.

A weird whining sound starts to reverberate through her accommodation, but Christine ignores it as she searches frantically for clothes. She finds the storage compartment labelled 'space suit undergarments', but cannot open the distorted door whose buckled frame entraps it.

Christine stops shivering and realises that she in near to death from hypothermia. When she locates the thermal blankets, Christine wraps all three around her body and forces herself to drink five hot coffees in quick succession.

Eventually, as she starts to feel just a little warmer, she thinks,

'You are going to get through this; but how do I know about these things? Where am I? And why can I see clearly, without glasses or contact lenses?'

***

Christine uses a jagged fragment of steel to cut the silk lining from her reduced animation pod, and then uses this material to insulate her hands and feet from the invasive coldness.

Once she starts to shiver again, Christine feels new hope, for she knows that her body has diverted some blood back to her limbs. She eats and drinks until she feels nauseatingly bloated.

After many hours, Christine warms sufficiently to stop shivering once more, this time because her body has warmed. She craves a tube of refreshing water, but her panic wells up yet again when she finds they have all frozen solid.

The radio continues to produce nothing but the sounds of the universe as Christine's recent memories slowly, sometimes painfully, return.