Maintenance Break
by James Rumpel
Jeremy had to make a decision and make it fast. There was a fifty-fifty chance that he would choose wrong and set off the bomb. He searched for a clue that would help him decide. The clock kept ticking. Unwilling to wait any longer, he picked the square on the right.
BOOM! The screen exploded in a pyrotechnic display of cartoon bomb explosions.
“Damn,” laughed Jeremy. “So close. You’d think someone who gets picked to colonize a new world would be smart enough to win an old-fashioned game like Minesweeper.”
“Well, maybe now you’ll get back to work,” said Susan as she cleaned the ship’s atmospheric filters.
“Hey, I was just taking a break. I’ve already checked all the battery banks. We don’t need to rush through this. Let’s enjoy being awake.”
Susan shook her head. “We have a lot to do. We should be reaching the beacons in less than a day.”
“You know,” said Jeremy as he closed his computer, “I’m beginning to think that we might not make a good couple. I don’t think I’m going to put you on my final pairing list when we get to New Earth.”
“That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said since we woke up. Now get to work. You need to check all the cryo-tube interfaces.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Jeremy gave a mock salute. He turned his back to hide the huge grin on his face. “Just my luck, I get to wake up only once during a two-hundred-year flight, and I have to be paired with Genghis the Hun.”
“I think you mean Atilla the Hun,” corrected Susan.
“Whatever.”
Jeremy floated to the back section of the ship. Forty cryo-tubes filled the compartment. Thirty-eight of the tubes held sleeping colonists. Every five years a pair of colonists would awaken to do maintenance and check the ship’s course. Once their duty was complete, they returned to suspended animation.
Checking the tube interfaces was a simple task. All Jeremy needed to do was link the diagnostic computer to each tube and wait for the results. If anything was not working correctly, the computer would make the necessary adjustments.
“Looks like Harold and Rishi are scheduled to be the next to wake up,” shouted Jeremy. “I wish I had been paired with Rishi; she’s nice.”
* * *
Jeremy and Susan sat in the ship’s command center. Jeremy played a computer game. Susan stared at the sensor display.
“Why don’t we just go back into cryo?” asked Jeremy, breaking the silence. “We’ve finished all the maintenance. There’s nothing else to do.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” replied Susan. “We should have already picked up signals from the lead ship’s beacon. This is really bad.”
“What can we do about it? Maybe it didn’t drop its beacon. Maybe the beacon isn’t working. Let’s just jettison our beacon and let Harold and Rishi worry about it when they wake up. They might find the next beacon without any problem.”
“You are such an idiot!” yelled Susan. “What if we’re off course? Without tracking the beacon, we have no way of finding New Earth. We’ll just keep going through space forever.”
“Nah. If we keep dropping our beacons, somebody will find us. For all we know, they’ve already developed faster than light travel back on Earth, and there will be a huge colony waiting for us on New Earth. Somebody will find us.”
“I can’t believe how naïve you are. Earth was dying. Why do you think they sent us out to start a new colony? How did you ever get selected? Is there some kind of imbecile quota or something?”
“For your information,” explained Jeremy, “I am the best computer programmer on this ship, and I’m well aware of the problems on Earth; I just happen to believe things will work out.”
Susan sighed heavily, “Don’t you realize how bad the situation is?”
“Enough,” said Jeremy. He stood so quickly that he found himself floating toward the ceiling. “I get everything you’re saying. I’m worried, too, but I’m confident that we’ll be okay. There’s nothing we can do to fix this. Maybe the last couple to do maintenance didn’t find the beacons either.”
“The log says they found the beacon right away.”
“We could enter that into the log as easily as they did. That doesn’t mean anything. I repeat; there is nothing we can do.”
Susan glared at him. “We could wake everyone up. Maybe somebody else has a suggestion.”
“That would just waste oxygen and resources. There isn’t enough food. We’d just end up all going back into suspended animation. I tell you; we have to trust that, if we are lost, someone will find us. It’ll be easier to wait for rescue if we just go back to sleep.”
“The ship shouldn’t be off course,” said Susan, ignoring Jeremy. “Everything seems to be working properly. The computer, navigations system, and sensor checks all came up perfectly green.”
Tears began to slowly roll down Susan’s cheek. She turned away and began inspecting a nearby panel.
“Okay,” sighed Jeremy, “Let me take another look at the sensor log. Maybe we missed something. You double-check navigation.”
* * *
An hour later, Jeremy looked up from the sensor monitor.
“Susan, come here!” he shouted. “I’ve found something.”
Susan rushed to his side. “What?”
“I think we passed the beacon just before we woke up. I noticed a slight gap in the log. It must have gone off-line for a short time.”
“But how do you know that’s when we went by the beacon?”
“I directly accessed the sensor data. There was a distinct blip while the log wasn’t receiving. We won’t be able to get any of the information from the beacon but at least we know we’re on the right course.”
“Thank you, Jeremy.” Susan gave him a quick embrace. “I am so relieved. I’ll go launch our beacon. You put the location of the one you found into the navigation system. The computer will adjust the ship’s speed so we hit the next drop spot during Harold and Rishi’s window.” She smiled as she pushed off in the direction of the helm.
“And I’ll record what happened in the ship’s log,” added Jeremy.
* * *
Jeremy closed the lid on Susan’s cryo-tube and activated the machinery. She wasn’t a bad person, a little uptight, but that was understandable.
Instead of climbing into his own tube, he sat down at the work table and activated a computer game. Had he done the right thing? Fooling Susan had been easy. She would never know that he had erased a section of the log and placed the small blip in the sensor readings.
It was better this way. Susan would never have been able to handle the truth, and there was nothing anyone could do about the ship’s situation.
One of the animated bombs on the computer screen exploded, causing the rest of the screen to erupt in fake devastation. Jeremy didn’t notice. He was too busy staring out the window, looking at nothing but empty, lifeless space.
Copyright © 2022 by James Rumpel
