Allie's Adventure on the Solar Wind

Allie’s Adventure on the Solar Wind

By

Paul David Robinson

Cover Design by Katrina Joyner

(53,782 words)

Copyright 1961, 1994, 2016 Paul David Robinson

ISBN: 9781370955190

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

FROM THE BACK COVER

Allie was the first child born on the Solar Wind, a spacecraft on a twenty-year mission to survey the asteroids for the United Nations. Nippon-American built the spacecraft and provided the crew. The UN provided the scientific staff from all over the world.

The staff and crew of the Solar Wind were expected to be sterile by the end of the voyage so they were required to leave ova and sperm deposits on earth for future use. Women will not be permitted to give birth to a child on the spacecraft and agree in writing to terminate any pregnancy.

This is Allie’s Adventure: How she came to be, why she was kept as the ship’s mascot, and became the first of thirty-five children secretly born on the Solar Wind.

If you like this story let me know. Visit my website and take the time to like me on Facebook. This book is also available in paperback.

https://www.pauldavidrobinson.com/

FOREWORD

This book is a vision of what life may be like for human beings in the future.

Will it be possible to know another person so well that you can almost be one person together and not two separate individuals?

The road to peace may not be walking in another person’s shoes but actually being that other person walking in his shoes. Then and only then can true understanding between human beings occur.

If that doesn’t happen in our evolution, the only option may be to leave the earth behind to be destroyed by human beings and find peace somewhere else in the universe.

Enjoy the story.

Paul David Robinson

September 28, 2016

Allie’s Adventure on the Solar Wind

CHAPTER ONE

Allie’s adventure started about seven years before she was born. It started with the dreams that Alexander Alexis Datre had in deep space.

Alex was the head of the maintenance engineers for the company and he was also the head of the nuclear physics team for the United Nations aboard the spacecraft: The Solar Wind.

He was one of a number of double dippers who received payment from two different sources as a member of the crew and a member of the staff of the Solar Wind.

The Solar Wind was on a mission to map the asteroid belt, locate and tag asteroids of great value, bump them out of orbit, and send them to the dark side of the moon for the use of the company that paid for the construction of the Solar Wind.

The Solar Wind looked like a mechanical shark with a barrel chest and a very long tail. At the end of the long tail were the nuclear engines. They were as far away from the barrel chest as they could be.

The barrel chest was actually a lifewheel inside a protective housing. The outer rounds of the lifewheel had earth normal gravity. The inner rounds had less and less gravity. The core or hub had no gravity at all.

The head of the ship contained the bridge. It did not spin. It was attached to the hub and through the hub it was attached to the tail. The crew had access to it through airlocks.

Anyone leaving the lifewheel went through an airlock. When they returned, they were required to go through decontamination before re-entering the lifewheel.

Alex was doing his biweekly debriefing with Katya Svenson. She was the staff therapist assigned to monitor his well being for the UN. Everything was routine until he told her about a recurrent dream.

She stopped him in mid-sentence. Alex, she said, when did this start?

He thought for a moment. A couple of days ago.

She asked, Tell me about of these dreams from the beginning and try to include what you did the day before they started.

He began again, but this time he picked up the activities of the day before the dream.

He and his crew were outside repairing the radio telescope.

Two members of his crew got careless. Such behavior could result in death for individuals, a work crew, or even the whole ship. Fortunately no one was hurt.

Alex reprimanded each of them on a private channel. Then he reassigned them to inside jobs on the spot. When they were safely inside the ship, Alex completed the outside work short-handed.

The two would work inside on repair detail and do simulated outside work in the net, under strict supervision. They would have to prove their competence again under simulated conditions before they would be permitted to work outside in actual situations.

Alex hated grounding any of his crew. But they had to know their personal limits when working outside. If they were sick, they should excuse themselves and go in. If they were tired, they should ask for relief. And no one should ever take their work so lightly that they would make it into any kind of game.

Alex expected self-discipline in his crew. But in this instance it was necessary for him to be the boss rather than a colleague. And the experience wore him out.

That night, he felt emotionally and mentally exhausted. He didn’t need to use any relaxation techniques in order to sleep. His deep sleep began as soon as he closed his eyes, or so it seemed to him. And in that deepest of sleeps, he had a dream.

In his dream, he was floating. That was common for a person spending so much time in zero gravity. But then he began to feel a sensation of being under water.

Sounds were muffled the way they are when a person is under water or in a bathtub with water over their ears. Yet it wasn’t one sound. It was hundreds of sounds all muffled at once. And they were coming from many different directions. He could hear conversations, music, tinkling glass, jet planes, helicopters, cars, and trucks.

Then, he began to sense that he wasn’t breathing, that he couldn’t breathe. He tried very hard and liquid flowed into his mouth and toward his lungs. He coughed it out and began to panic. He remembered almost drowning that time in the Gulf.

He tried to swim his way to a breath of air. He kicked his feet and moved his arms. And he reared up out of bed and he hit his head against the netting above him. That woke him up.

He was sweating and breathing hard, but he knew where he was immediately, and he went back to sleep without further incident.

His other dreams that night were of work and friends, and of Iliss. He missed Iliss.

He met her back on Earth at a reception for the crew and staff of the Solar Wind. They discovered that they could hear each other think. They kept it a secret from everyone.

Eventually they fell in love before leaving earth. She was to have been one of the UN nuclear physics staff. She was married to Jack McKenzie but she and Alex planned to live together aboard ship after it left earth orbit. However, Iliss was killed in an automobile accident on her way to her final medical checkup before departure.

Even two years later, Alex still dreamed about Iliss. Like other times, he did not use her name. But Katya knew he meant Iliss. Katya knew that he had fallen in love with Iliss. Katya fell in love with Iliss as well. It was a secret they only shared with each other.

Alex assumed his unusual dream was the result of his state of mind. So the next day, he talked to his grounded crewmembers, one on one, over a drink in the lounge. Any problems between them were resolved. They both agreed that Alex was right. They had been careless. And they thanked him for calling it to their attention.

So the second night Alex was feeling good. There shouldn’t have been anything to trouble his sleep. But again, during his deeper sleep, he had the same dream. Only this time, since he knew it was a dream that he had before, he let himself dream.

He was floating, under water. He was floating in hundreds of pieces in a hundred places; some places were dark, others light; some were colder than others. He could hear muffled sounds all around.

He would move a flipper or a tail. (Or was it an arm and a hand, or a leg and a foot?) And suddenly he had a hundred limbs moving, two hundred limbs moving, four hundred limbs moving, then only one limb moving.

He was moving here. Then he was moving over there, and then again, another place altogether. He couldn’t tell if he had fingers and toes or talons and claws. He wasn’t himself. He was something else and he was somewhere else. Then he was himself again. And he knew exactly where he was, but it wasn’t on the Solar Wind in his sleeping tube. A second later he didn’t know where he was, because part of him moved somewhere else, in an entirely different place.

Then, for a moment, he was connected to all this movement and sound and feeling, and aware of himself lying in the sleeping tube. All the movement was elsewhere. His own hands weren’t moving and he wasn’t kicking his own feet or moving his own toes.

He didn’t have ten other feet that could move different ways at the same time, or did he? He could feel them moving. He could feel the cold or the warm. He could hear all the different sounds coming from so many directions all at once.

It was confusing, but it was a dream. He let it be.

Then suddenly, the sense of not breathing became so oppressive. He couldn’t help it. He fought himself awake. He was covered with sweat and all he could hear was his own deep and heavy breathing.

As he lay there, he looked through the netting at the ceiling above his sleeping tube. The glow from his computer, keyboard, and the other control panels in the room enabled him to see. He was definitely in his room.

He checked the time. It was a little early, but he got up and started his day.

Then last night, the same thing happened, but it happened faster. And he didn’t have to be asleep. All he had to do was relax his mind and he was there, in the dream. He let himself go with the dream. He wasn’t frightened any more. The image and the sensation stayed with him all night long.

Then today, he discovered that the dream was there in the back of his mind all the time. He didn’t have to be resting or sleeping. All he had to do was let his mind drift and he was into the dream and all the images and sensations that it produced.

It was strange, but not uncomfortable. He wasn’t concerned about it, he was reporting it to Katya as she requested.

I don’t know what to say about it, Alex. Katya commented. Can you get into it right now?

Alex answered, I think so.

Katya said, Well, do it.

The contour chair had a head and footrest. He leaned back and stretched out. He closed his eyes. After a while, he said, I’m having a little trouble with it. I keep thinking about you, Katya. I can hear you breath.

Katya said, Well, I can’t guide a fantasy nor do a dream search if I leave the room.

He said, I know that. He opened his eyes and looked at her.

She smiled and said, Maybe it would help if I turned out the light.

He said, Try it.

She got up and turned out the light. There was only a slight glow from some instruments across the room.

He sighed. Then he said, Try not to breathe for a minute.

She stood still, not moving, holding her breath. She held it as long as she could. Then she breathed in as quietly as she could.

Her eyes hadn’t grown accustomed to the dark yet. But she was aware of his location. Katya was very conscious of his presence in a darkened room.

She thought, stop it. You’re working. Snap out of it.

But it took her a few minutes to get control of her emotions. By then he was into the dream, and said so.

Talk about it. she encouraged quietly.

He said, I’m floating.

She said, Let yourself go. Relax. Go with the feelings.

He began to breathe faster.

She said, Talk about it.

He said, I’m not floating in as many pieces now as I was when it started. There aren’t hundreds. Maybe sixty. Maybe more.

Can you count them?

No. he said, There’s no constancy. I’m aware of feeling a part of me in one place and then I’m in another place. I can’t tell for sure where I’ve been and were else I am. I can’t focus on any one place or piece. I am all pieces and places at the same time, and each one separately. But there’s an ebb and flow to it. It’s a constant motion from togetherness to separation, and back.

Katya’s eyes had adjusted to the dark. She could see him lying back in the chair. She came forward. She wished she could check his pulse, but dared not interfere yet. She tried to listen to his breathing as he talked. He wasn’t breathing as fast now and his breathing got more normal as he talked.

What about your breathing? Katya asked.

Alex began to breathe more rapidly. I’m not breathing! he gasped. He struggled up in his chair and opened his eyes.

Katya turned up the light.

It blinded him for a moment and broke his connection with his dream or fantasy.

She could see a thin film of sweat on his face, chest, and hands where the skin was exposed. Now she checked his pulse. It was over two hundred.

I thought you said you could handle this. Katya commented.

He said, I can. But you asked me about my breathing. I tried focusing on breathing, and I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t breathing.

She said, But you were. I heard you. I could see your diaphragm working.

He said, But the sensation of not breathing, of not being able to breathe, is very real in this dream. It reminds me of the time I almost drowned. That had happened when he was in the ocean with Iliss back on Earth. He never mentioned Iliss by name during a session.

Katya said, I remember you telling me about it.

Alex asked, What do you think of this dream?

Katya responded, I haven’t heard of anyone else having a dream quite like this. Most people dream about floating now and then. It has to do with the freefall exercises. And most of those dreams are quite pleasant. When they have bad dreams, they dream about floating away from the ship without hope of rescue. They dream about suffocating in a spacesuit. But they don’t dream about not breathing, as you describe. And no one has mentioned dreaming about floating under water in a hundred pieces and in a hundred different places.

Alex asked, What do you suggest I do?

Katya answered, "Nothing. Relax