CHAPTER 21
August 25, 2089
Roy Burbank couldn’t sleep. He was more than too damned tired. He was frustrated. Something kept nagging him. It was one of those just out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye kinds of things that make you want to stop the car, turn around, and go take a look just one more time. He was having one of those “what the hell is going on” moments. The fact that there had been something acting up with the PINS months ago during the test phase that he never could put his finger on wouldn’t leave his mind. It kept creeping into his thoughts. Sure, they’d found the gamma ray sources that were clearly not supposed to be there. But he’d never found the initial problem and then things just started working right.
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” he recalled telling the team. But that didn’t rest well with him. To be honest, he hadn’t really rested well since that test was conducted months back. But all the retests showed no problems. He’d gone over and over the data. He’d had Nigel run every algorithm, simulation variation, and every error check on the experiment, data, and analyses that he could think of. They found nothing wrong. But still, something nagged at him.
“What if I missed something then?” He raised up from the bunk and took a deep breath. “Lights on. What if the sabotage was there all along?”
He sat upright for a moment, rubbing at the sleep matter in the corners of his eyes. He glanced at the clock on the datapad screen and realized that he had slept longer than he’d expected but not as long as he’d wanted. “That makes no sense. Oh hell, lights out.”
Roy plopped lazily back against the pillow and sighed. The covers were warm and inviting and he was tired, dammit. He tugged at them, dragging the weak magnetically weighted blanket over him again. They’d been through the PINS front to back and couldn’t find anything else wrong. Cindy and the techs would be all over it again and again. It would be fine. But what if it wasn’t fine? What if? The crew would be lost in space until they died of starvation, lack of something or other, or who knew what perils.
He and Cindy and the techs had practically rebuilt the PINS main system down in the astrogation room. They’d tested it against simulated good data from the telescopes and it worked flawlessly. Roy thought about that again.
“We tested it with simulated good data and it worked flawlessly,” he muttered into the darkened quarters. He thought about the original first test that went iffy months back. It actually had hardware in the loop, meaning the sensors were actually connected to the PINS box. It had worked . . . well, the second time.
“It worked the second time . . . ” Roy yawned and tried to force the nagging thought from his head with hopes of going back to sleep for an hour or so. “We just had to insert the red/blue shift simulator algorithm to make the data from the telescopes look like the ship was moving on its way to Proxima. Easy stuff, Roy.
“Easy . . . stuff . . . Roy . . . ” He had almost drifted back to sleep. “Easy . . . stuff . . . ”
For a moment Roy was actually in that land between being awake and being asleep. He was at that moment where the brain often sends random leg-twitch signals that will either wake the body or not depending on how deeply tired the body is. Roy was tired, very tired. But his mind was twisted with doubt, a nagging doubt. His legs twitched.
“You wouldn’t have to shift the clocks!”
Roy raised straight up, tossing the covers off so abruptly they flittered upward and billowed like a parachute in the low gee of the spaceship. The magnetic threads woven throughout them popped them back down in a wrinkled pile against the metal frame at the foot of the bed. Roy stumbled and almost rocketed himself into the bulkhead on the far side of his quarters before he could gain his composure and force his mind to wake up completely.
“We didn’t check the data stream between the telescope with actual data from pulsars to the PINS. Each time we had to simulate our acceleration. There’s a weak link in the chain.” He rushed his clothes on and debated forgoing shaving and brushing his teeth until he took a deep breath and rubbed his tongue about his mouth a couple of times. He slowed down and decided a shower and general hygiene could come first.