GRANULAR

Through most of Zach’s seven-hour spaceflight back to Central Colony Four, he could think of nothing else but the bizarre granular effect he’d seen first hand. Well, that and the startling sensor readings he’d taken in his hotel room the following morning. Well, that and being a murder suspect on an alien lunar colony. Well, that and Paula Altenberg, whose dark brown eyes seemed to gaze at him from every smooth surface in his cabin.

Surely, it was just the heat of the moment. Paula had been a friendly face in an alien environment, after a night of terrifying dreams. But whatever his logical mind demanded he believe, his body refused to comply. The memory of her voice, the light bouncing off her hair, the way she smiled at him, as if…

“What good is it?” he whispered. He clapped both hands over his face and tried to make peace with the truth. He was infatuated with that woman, but felt as if the odds of seeing her again were lower than the freezing point of mercury. Wait, he realized, that made no sense. Lower odds equated with lower temperatures? Maybe space-time wasn’t the only thing that was breaking up into dysfunctional bits.

Get a grip, he thought.

Earlier in his life, he’d had a best friend to confide in. But the stress of work and the inertia of his daily routine had made friendship into a time-intensive luxury. Now he had no one.

After too many postponed dates and absent-minded conver-sations, his last two relationships had also dissipated, like steam off a hot griddle. The fact was, his work had become everything to him. And now, his inability to either analyze or classify the granular effect, much less combat it, left him all alone in the universe.

But only if he gave up, he decided. It wasn’t as if he knew nothing about the forces that shaped space-time. Whatever the granular effect was, it had to be an outgrowth of existing phenomena. If he could just identify the trigger mechanism. But so far, he lacked the data to reach a meaningful conclusion. When he returned to his lab on Central Four, he could analyze the meagre datastream he’d managed to collect before Altov’s shocking call.

Fortunately, he’d already retrieved that data with his handheld, from the scanners he’d abandoned in his hotel suite. It was now safely uploaded to Bohr University’s NexusNebula. Good thing he’d acted fast. Now that his commercial star liner had enfolded itself in a so-called “warp bubble“ ─ an archaic term that Zach loathed ─ no wireless signal could come in or out.

And now what? With three more hours to go, he might have thought to read through archived output from the inter-temporal analysis he’d left behind to pursue this madness. Yet it wasn’t at all clear that his project was relevant anymore. Maybe, perish the thought, the nature of space-time itself had changed. He and the rest of human science might have to start over from scratch!

Need a drink, he told himself.

Unlike the cramped quarters endured by conventional air-travelers in centuries past, the average star liner was spacious and well-appointed. With only a tiny fraction of external gravity and no
wind resistance, a star liner’s size was limited mostly by market forces. That meant a weary traveler looking for diversion had a lot of options.

He walked out of his cabin and headed for the star liner’s food court. In his fevered state of mind, the “Gravity Well Bar and Grill“ seemed to materialize like a desert mirage just a few meters to his left. On entering, Zach waved off a robotic server and slid onto the corner barstool. On the next stool was a human male absorbed in day-old news on a bright red quantum tablet.

Zach ordered two fingers of Epsilon Eridani scotch and tried to make his heart settle down. But the moment the android bartender set his glass on the counter, Zach’s neighbor looked up from his reading. A burly man, his salt and pepper hair was a jagged array of asymmetrical razor cuts.

“Civilization’s going crazy,” he said. “Did you hear the latest?”

“Haven’t kept up with the news,” said Zach into his drink.

“You gotta,” said the man. “This reporter just blew the lid off the Extrasol Construction Company.”

Zach glanced at him sideways. There were conspiracy theory jockeys all over his university campus ─ most of whom were first-year students. He didn’t expect to find any on a commercial star liner and certainly not in this man’s age bracket.

“Hey, I know that look,” said Zach’s bar mate. “Listen, my name’s Preston Carter, I’m a journalist. You heard of me?”

“Sorry,” said Zach. “Like I said, I’m not much of a news hound.”

“OK,” said Preston. “I respect that, even if I can’t understand it. But at least you know the difference between news and misinformation, right?”

“Sure,” said Zach. “But in my field, we hear all kinds of space-related rumors. I mean, haven’t people been crying wolf about WorldGov colonies for the last hundred revs?”

Preston stared at him a moment, then jammed a pudgy thumb into the screen of his tablet.

“Yeah?” he said. “Well this is real. Reporter from the Sidereal Chronicle … uh … Paula Altenberg. She’s top notch. See? Even you’ve heard of her.”

Zach’s jaw had dropped just enough to give him away, but he decided there was no reason to let on exactly how he’d heard
of Paula.

“So … what’s going to blow the lid off Extrasol?” he asked.

According to Paula’s reporting, Preston told him, there’d been a sharp rise in severe accidents at space colonies originally laid out by Extrasol’s automated construction crews. Particularly jarring had been a series of explosions in the colonies’ main power grids.

Preston’s eyes widened.

“What do you think?” he said. “It says here that there was an explosion on Haliak just yesterday, over in the high-rent district ─ and Haliak was totally an Extrasol job. Lucky for me, I was covering the opening of the new Crelenk space observatory on the other side of town. Hey, what field did you say you were in?”

“I just said I’d heard a lot of rumors,” said Zach.

“Naw,” said Preston. “You said ’in my field.’ You a scientist?”

Zach shrugged. At some point, he decided, a little bit of truth might go farther than a whole lot of denial toward keeping his mission secret. He raised his glass, as if in a salute.

“Zach Griffin,” be said. “I’m in the Astrophysics Department at
Bohr University.”

“Right,” said Preston. “The Time guy! Wow, would I like to get a statement from you about this Extrasol scandal.”

Zach winced.

“Oh … no … no,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t seen any of the data.
Ms. Altenberg might be very reputable, but that doesn’t make her scientifically literate. You see what I mean?”

Preston let out a sigh.

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Hey bartender, another round for me and my friend. Don’t worry, I’ll cover it. I’ll bet those university types are pretty stingy with reimbursements, am I right?”

Zach nodded knowingly, even though his expense account was more than adequate for any reasonable expense.

“So, tell me,” said Preston. “What’s a hot-plasma guy like you doing all the way out on Haliak? Don’t tell me you have a thing for Crelenk females.”

“It’s classified,” said Zach. “And for the record….”

“Aw, come on, that was a joke,” said Preston. “But help me out, will ya? Here I am, a science journalist, alone for three hours with a top temporal expert. Can’t you give me something? My editor is already chewing me out for letting Altenberg get the Extrasol scoop.”

Zach took a deep breath and made two key realizations. In the first place, with the potential for murder charges to be leveled at him by the Crelenk government, he wasn’t in a position to make an enemy of an aggressive journalist. Second, with the gist of Paula’s article nibbling at the edge of his consciousness — not to mention everything he’d been through in the previous twenty-four hours — talking shop with Preston was probably the best way to escape his obsessive thoughts.

“Buy me dinner,” he said. “I’ll see if I can come up with something exclusive about my latest work, OK?”

Later that night, well fed and a bit more inebriated than he was used to, Zach found himself fighting to stay awake on the lander for Central Colony Four. So when a team of three plain-clothes members of the Bohr University security team confronted him after Customs, it was a little overwhelming. The first to speak was a tall, Chinese woman dressed as if for a formal dinner party.

“Professor Griffin?” she said. “No need to worry. We have your security needs met. Your car’s waiting. Come this way.”

Zach’s slurred speech embarrassed him, but not nearly as much as the phrase ’security needs’ scared him.

Read Episode 4 now