The Curious Journey of Mr. Eric Delko or Red Star Galactica

"I'M AFRAID I did it too fast," said Tasha Ringkels. " Look, my override program won't kick in."

"Never mind. It doesn't matter now." Milan gazed at that whisking bowl of a viewscreen, which by now was only showing a tiny portion of the Earth. "What's going on down there, Feofil?"

Tig consulted his datascope. "It's 1917. The Revolution." He laughed bitterly. "Now you see it, now you don't---we're back in Czarist times already."

"Which makes us, I suppose, dangerous revolutionaries? Forerunners of the Great Explosion."

"What?"

"I mean the Revolution."

"Oh, that explosion!" Feofil tapped the isocalendar. "Well, that shouldn't bother the Czar for long. I make it 3 minutes till Tunguska."

Milan switched on his chin-mike. "Commander Adamavich to all crew. We have failed. The good news is that this will happen too fast for any of us to feel pain, or even to realize we are feeling pain. There's nothing to be afraid of." He felt his pet fly buzzing in the little box in his pocket as if trying to flee. "For your information, we will drop out of flux in the year 1908. We think the Galactica may well explode over the Tunguska region of Central Siberia. If it's any consolation, we're all about to become part of a great mystery. Be proud, my friends. You will have all died for Mother Russia."

He switched off. They sat and waited.

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"30 seconds remaining," said Feofil.

"Flux-field holding steady," reported Tasha.

Ila gestured at the screens, alive with light. "Massive ionization effects---we must be visible for hundreds of gektars."

"Negative field!"

Briefly, on some screens, they saw a green-brown landscape streaked with clouds far below. Then the redstar lurched hugely, swinging askew as the thin air tore at its contours, pushing it along a new course.

Feofil cried out in agony as G-forces slammed him against his straps, breaking his ribs. From somewhere else on the ship came distant screams. And Tasha Ringkels's head lolled sideways at an impossible angle!

The gyrating Galactica pitched in a new direction. All five points of the redstar were raging with the abrasion of the atmosphere, trying to tear apart from one another. But the ship had no time to break up.

Milan struggled for words. "Ila! I...."

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He fell through time, dazed and sickened by a strobing mosaic of visions which overloaded any attempt to make sense of them all. Everything that had happened since 1908 seemed to be flashing through his brain in images, burning it out one cell at a time.....

Images of war, of burning cities under siege, mobs rioting, trails of jets dropping stick-like bombs, of spacecraft blasting off, and of new cities rising. The faces of Lenin, Hitler, Gandhi, Mao, Gagarin, Einstein, Reagan, Clinton, Yeltsin, Putin, Biden, Bush raced towards him and away. Images of past time and images of his own time whirlpooled around him, dragging him down through the vortex.

He screamed.

Like chaff burning off from a heat-shield, fragmentary visions streamed out of the sun-bright depths of the vortex. Flashes of Hiroshima, Stalingrad, 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Moonbase Liberty, the Great Comet of 2040, the March on Mecca, the reconstruction of the Eiffel Tower, the deification of the paranormal infant Chanelle Zapata and her assassination by (well, naturally) an FBS agent.

"Aieeeeeeeeeeee!!!!"

All of these fragments did form part of a medley. The shattered pieces of history flew together and morphed into a face---his own! Each of the cells of his skin and flesh a separate bit of history. The same forehead, the humorous wrinkles fanning from his light-colored eyes, the tousled light-gray hair. The face cast a shadow behind it, like a deathmask molded from inside his head.

"God, let me die!!!!"

But God didn't let him die. The medley broke up, and he fell down the funnel of visions again. The whirlpool began to ripple nauseatingly, distorting everything he saw. Waves rose; they rushed by the funnel towards him, ripping images apart and reforming them upside-down or inside-out---warping faces, altering events. For a moment his own body seemed to knot itself into a Klein bottle shape, then it snapped back again....

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Abruptly he dropped through the bottom of the funnel. He was still sitting in his Commander's seat, staring at the swirling fog on the screen. "What....?"

"We....live," said Tasha in wonder, nearby.

"My chest," mumbled Feofil----and he breathed in cautiously. "It's okay! It's not smashed!"

"We're still alive!" Ila cried. "But how can we be? Look, we're still diving towards the Earth----we haven't hit it yet. God, surely we don't have to live through that again! And again and again and again!"

"Positive Flux-field," said Tasha. "According to this it's never been negative."

Feofil waved at the datascope. "We're back in 1898. We missed Tunguska."

"But we didn't miss it---we exploded!"

"And we're still heading down the years."

"Towards what, another collision?"

"Around 1890. No---twelve years earlier!"

"Do we have to hit and hit and hit again, like a stone bouncing over a lake, before we finally sink. I can't bear to go through that again!"

"Welcome to your time-storm, Tasha," Milan said. "This is what it looks and feels like."

The Curious Journey of Mr. Eric Delko or Red Star Galactica

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