Inhuman(9)

He hugged her, holding her face to his broad chest and resting his own cheek on the top of her head. “I feel it too, Daniella. It’s not your imagination.”

She looked up at him. “Then why are you going? Why don’t you stay here? If something bad happens, then at least we’re together! I’m afraid when you’re gone. Every time you leave to go with James, I’m afraid it’ll be the last time I see you.”

His lips formed a slight pout. “I don’t want you to feel that way. Look, Daniella, he needs to know about the Planck energy and about the Planck platform. He needs to know how dangerous it is. We shouldn’t have hidden it from him for so long. But once I tell him, once I get this over with, what he does with that information will be up to him.”

“Do you promise? You’ll come right home?”

He smiled and nodded. “Yes.”

She hugged him hard.

He sighed. “After all, eternal youth or not, I’m getting too old for this crap.”





6



Old-timer’s forward momentum slowed as he flew through the vacuum of space, floating in the serene, silent blackness, his eyes forward as he watched for any sign of the impending arrival of the nebula that Thel had told him would signify James. He thought he could make out ripples of distortion in the blackness, but he couldn’t be sure, and he blinked several times in an effort to refocus his eyes. Then, suddenly, he thought he glimpsed an object off in the distance that appeared like a golf ball racing toward him on the 9th hole, causing him to instinctively duck, but when he looked again, nothing was there except for the elusive black distortion. “What the heck am I getting myself into here?”

Just seconds later, the object reappeared, as though out of the nothingness, its trajectory dizzying as it seemed to pop into existence from out of the murky cloud. It was massive, white, and almost planet-sized from Old-timer’s perspective.

Again, in a panic, he held his hands over his head instinctively, but his other appendages—the dozens of thin tendrils that he controlled like fingers—flashed open in a reflex that caused Old-timer to temporarily appear like a jellyfish as he covered his face and braced for an impact that he was sure would be lethal if it were not for the fact he had also ignited his magnetic field at the same time. He expected to open his eyes after smashing an impact crater into the surface of the dazzling, mammoth object. Instead, after a few moments in which he tried to catch his breath from the fright, he opened his eyes to see James’s smiling countenance in his mind’s eye.

“Hey,” James said, his chrome-colored lips forming the same friendly, instantly recognizable smile that Old-timer had known for almost twenty years.

Old-timer’s hands lowered from their protective position over his face, as did the magnetic field that his new skin didn’t require him to use for protection in space, but that he’d kept nonetheless for its other advantages when he’d designed his new upgraded body with James. The tendrils also re-furled onto his torso, but as he looked down, he noticed—much to his chagrin—that many of them had punctured his shirt, leaving it looking like Swiss cheese. “I thought I’d just bought the farm,” Old-timer exhaled, relieved.

“Sorry,” James replied. “I sensed you, but time and space were warped for me. Heh, uh, it’s my first time dragging a moon through the solar system so, you’ll have to forgive my bad driving.”

Old-timer grinned and slapped his friend on the shoulder before laughing. “So, even with your godlike abilities, you still make mistakes?”

“Oh yeah,” James replied, as friendly as ever. “I know it seems godlike—magical even—but as Clarke said, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’ and make no mistake, it’s just technology.”

Old-timer turned to the gleaming white surface of the moon James was dragging through space, the albedo of the white surface so bright that he had to squint as his eyes adjusted. The surface, though relatively smooth compared to the surface of a planet like Mercury, was crisscrossed with lines, cracks and speckled with circular domes and pits. “Is that Europa?” he asked in astonished disbelief, even though he already knew the answer. He recognized it from the many times he and James had flown over it on scouting missions over the years, the familiar clay-colored streaks called lineae, on the otherwise white surface, were a dead giveaway. He asked the question anyway, his astonishment preventing him from accepting the reality before his eyes.

James looked over his shoulder proudly at the moon before turning back to Old-timer with a smile. “It sure is.”