James felt that time suddenly rushed, like the rushing waters of a river flowing down mountains, and like swift waters that swirled in whirlpools, it seemed to turn into a vortex in which he was nearly drowned. He wondered why such a colourful comparison had suddenly appeared in his mind. The comparison was quite appropriate to the situation indeed, but completely useless. Another thought came to his head at the same time. He must find a way out as soon as possible. Otherwise, there would be no ‘later’, neither for him nor his two companions who now stood on either side of his chair. The rock-ice celestial body, he could see as a blurred spot on the vewscreen, could become the Otherworld for all three of them.

  ‘Concentrate, concentrate, you must concentrate!’ he kept telling himself over and over again, but he was not able to concentrate. Various images that flashed before his eyes were not of the present but of the past when he was not yet a Space Force pilot and could not even imagine that one day he would be.

  He turned around and looked at Ashley and Oliver. The girl’s face expressed confusion, and Oliver looked thoughtful. He shifted his eyebrows, then ran a finger over his nose and said a harsh word in a near-silent whisper; James could only guess at the movement of his lips. Ashley took a deep breath.

  ‘We can do nothing,’ said she sadly.

  ‘You think so too?’ said James, turning to Oliver again. The boy shrugged.

  ‘I dunno,’ he muttered, barely audible.

  He could feel the whirlpool he was caught in continuing to swirl, pulling him deeper and deeper into it. Panic, that is what it was, he thought. It was panic that kept him from thinking. That has happened to him before, most recently when… when…

  ‘We can do nothing,’ Ashley repeated in a whisper, and James mentally berated himself for not realising before. The same sickening sense of his helplessness had gripped him when the shuttlecraft’s damned artificial intelligence had blocked all their attempts to change orbit after the supply spacecraft had exploded. What had they done then? Maybe they need to do the same again?

  ‘Not at all!’ he said. ‘We can do something. We’ve done it once before, so we’d do it again.’

  ‘What we’ve done?’ asked the girl distractedly.

  ‘Dr. Bowman said this shuttle was designed for scientific research,’ he began instead of answering. ‘Therefore, its artificial brain was designed for scientific research, right?’

  Ashley nodded in confirmation.

  ‘So,’ James went on, ‘the main thing for us is that this activity would distract it.’

  ‘Do you think about artificial intelligence –’ Ashley began.

  ‘I’m just stating a fact,’ James interrupted her. ‘Why do strange things keep happening? Why did we end up here? We miscalculated, got caught in the planetoid’s gravity, or our too-clever computer directed the shuttle here. Think about that.’

  ‘Okay, what do you want from me now?’ The girl said that with a note of annoyance in her voice.

  ‘He wants you to give it the hardest task,’ Oliver chimed in, visibly revitalised.

  ‘Which task?’ Ashley seemed not to understand.

  ‘For example… for example –’ James began and stopped, having no idea. ‘Yep, for example, ask it to analyse all the parameters of the orbit and everything else of this damned planetoid, calculate how much time it takes to make a full revolution around the Sun; the duration of a full revolution on its axis, and at the same time have it look for satellites. I mean, the planetoid can have satellites, right? Well, and anything else you can think of. I’m sure you’d think of something, you’re so brilliant. By the way, at the same time, we’re going to collect all the information we can about our discovery; otherwise, it’s going to be really stupid: we’ve found a probable new Solar System planet and can’t say anything about it.’

  ‘And?’ Ashley shook her head.

  ‘We’ll try to bypass that too clever brain once more,’ Oliver whispered in a barely audible voice, almost only with his lips.

  ‘I dunno about you two,’ James went on. ‘I don’t wanna kick the bucket here.’

  ‘No way!’ Oliver picked up decisively and added with a chuckle, ‘We’re the stars of this show.’

  ‘What show?’ Ashley asked irritably.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said James. ‘The point is that the stars can’t die; otherwise the show would be over as soon as it started, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ Oliver picked up again. ‘Personally, I have big plans.’

  ‘Kinda?’ James chuckled.

  ‘First of all I’m going to get out of this cesspool,’ said Oliver meaningfully, ‘then… well, become an engineer, produce a couple of offspring…’

  Ashley giggled.

  ‘…Well, not right now, of course,’ added the boy, as it might have seemed, slightly embarrassed, ‘later… um… someday.’

  ‘By a cesspool, you mean the planetoid you’ve dreamed of exploring up and down,’ said James with an involuntary smile.

  ‘I mean the fucking shit we’ve got ourselves into,’ said Oliver. ‘Pardon my French,’ he added, looking at Ashley. The girl giggled again.

  ‘So,’ James picked up, ‘we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do, we haven’t got much time. Come on, Ashley, concentrate, and give the shuttle’s brain the task, which would make it forget everything in the world. While it’s straining its optic electronics or whatever its brain is, we can fix the program, test it again, and finally try to break free. Check?’

  There was a noticeable light in the girl’s face that James mentally marked as a good thing.

  ‘Check,’ said she, nodding and smiling. Then she took a deep breath, her brow furrowed as if she was thinking for a second; then she shook her head and began, ‘Computer…’

  The task she gave the artificial intelligence was almost exactly the same as James had suggested. He did not listen to her words and returned to the programme still displayed on the flight control station screen. Out of the corner of his ear, he then heard the sacramental ‘Complying’, and out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the countdown on the main viewscreen. The shuttle’s artificial brains had given Ashley more than two hours to complete his task. He thought that was exactly what was needed and immersed himself in the programme.

  The thing he disliked most was doing. Writing a programme was easy; he had probably done it hundreds of times. Making a programme work was much harder. Checking for errors in the command codes and everything else was the most painful part of the process. He had not even realised that he was saying all this out loud, albeit very quietly. Ashley heard him.

  ‘Let me have a go,’ she said.

  It took James a moment to catch on.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, yes, you’ll do it, but I’ll do too, and then we’ll compare the results. One head is good, but two are much better. Oliver, you’ll have something to do too…’

  For a while, his work distracted him from the thoughts that kept popping into his head. Twice, he thought he had made a mistake and had to start again. In the top right corner of the main viewscreen, the countdown to the computer’s task completion was running. Meanwhile, on the view screen itself, the outline of the planet the shuttle was approaching was becoming clearer and clearer. All James could think about was whether the computer would run out of time before the shuttle reached the calculated point at which it would have to change its trajectory. Would artificial intelligence not take over again?

  At last he was finished and handed over his part of the calculations and the programme to Ashley for checking over, got a bit of a breather. There should be no mistake this time. If the artificial intelligence was the cause of the shuttle going out of control, they had only one chance. The thought was so entrenched in his mind that he did not immediately hear the girl’s voice.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong,’ said she. ‘The programme should start without any problems.’

  ‘You mean it just seems to be, or really?’ he asked back, turned to her side. Ashley shrugged.

  ‘We’ll only find out once we get the programme up and running,’ said she.

  ‘If it’s not too late already,’ he muttered. Suddenly, something changed on Ashley’s face.

  ‘There’s only five minutes left…’ she whispered a warning. ‘Only five minutes!’ James glanced at the countdown again. They would barely make it. The computer sped up. The numbers in the viewscreen right corner showed six minutes to complete the task.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he continued in the same way, as quietly as if to himself, then added a little louder, ‘Oliver, what about the drive system?’

  ‘Same as always,’ the boy responded.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Don’t panic, man,’ Oliver chuckled. ‘I’ve got it under control.’ His voice sounded cheerful.

  ‘Are you saying you’re prepared?’

  ‘Always prepared,’ the boy said, raising his hand in a scout salute.

  ‘Three minutes,’ Ashley whispered again. He glanced at the main screen and felt his feet suddenly go cold. ‘One minute…’ the girl’s voice came to him again. The artificial intelligence seemingly was accelerating rapidly. The cold that bound James’s legs was rising higher and higher, already engulfing the whole body somewhere around his stomach. Time rushed on again, turning into a vortex that drew him in deeper and deeper. It seemed like there was no way out, no matter how hard he tried, though he was not trying to get out at all. He was sitting silently in his chair at the flight control panel, staring stupidly at the viewscreen, which showed a barely perceptible approaching celestial body.

  It was still in a small sphere form with blurred edges, visible only because the shuttle’s artificial brain was processing sensor data to create an image on the viewscreen. He sat motionless, staring at this image like a deer caught in the headlights. ‘Like a deer caught in the headlights’, flashed through his mind. ‘A good comparison, considering what could happen very soon,’ he thought.

  ‘What happened?’ Ashley whispered. ‘It’s time. Run the program!’ He was still sitting on his chair, without moving.

  ‘Hey!’ Oliver joined in impatiently. ‘C’mon, man, England expects!’

  ‘Jimmy!’ cried Ashley, jumping up from his seat and rushing towards him. ‘Ji-i-i-mmy!’ She touched his shoulder with her hand, from which a spark seemed to run through his body.

  This spark brought him out of his stupor. He felt as if something had thrown him into the air. His fingers automatically fell on the touchscreen; automatically, without even realising how it happened, he gave the command to run the programme.

  That impulse lasted only a moment. Panic gripped him again. Was the manoeuvre calculated correctly? What would happen as the shuttle’s trajectory slid them past the invisible point under the planet’s surface at thirty thousand kilometres? That was the only thought that kept going round and round in his mind. He had himself as rather bright in mathematics until it was time to put that knowledge into practice. Finally, he could not take it anymore.

  ‘Ashley,’ he whispered, ‘look at that.’

  The girl leaned over the flight control panel, cocked her eyebrows in perplexity, and shook her head.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Everything’s wrong!’ James replied. She rubbed her nose.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong… I guess.’

  For the next half a minute, they kept silent. James closed his eyes and then opened them again, studying the readings on the screen at the flight control station.

  ‘We’re… we’re on… on the new course,’ he whispered. ‘We’re on the new course!’ he cried. ‘It’s impossible!’

  ‘Seems possible,’ said Ashley.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  ‘I didn’t doubt it,’ joined Oliver, who was inconspicuously close by somehow. ‘We had to get it done, and we’ve got it.’

  James looked at the readings again. All indications were that the shuttle was in the orbit they needed. ‘I’ve done it! We’ve done it!’ he exclaimed mentally and could barely keep bouncing in his chair. ‘Not bad,’ he muttered instead.

  ‘Grandpa said,’ Oliver uttered meaningfully, looking at James and Ashley as if upside down, ‘everything depends on a result. If you go outside procedures and it blows up in your face, you’re an idiot. If you go outside the box and it works, you’re an original thinker.’

  ‘Well, and who’s an original thinker?’ said Ashley.

  ‘We all,’ Oliver replied with a broadest smile …

  … The shuttle’s control centre was so quiet it rang James’s ears. He only glanced at the flight control console from time to time. Almost nothing changed in the data displayed on the tactical screen, and almost nothing changed in the image displayed by the external cameras on the main viewscreen. The shuttle was still on the same trajectory, which, if they had done nothing wrong, should eventually take them to the rendezvous point with the Endurance. If they had done nothing wrong and if the shuttle's artificial intelligence did not decide to intervene again.

  After that day, which was not just hard but extremely hard and nerve-wracking, followed several quiet, even boring days. His head tilted by itself from time to time, and he felt as if he were falling asleep. He had been here alone for the last four shifts, not without problems getting Ashley to rest. Not surprisingly, on top of that, he had been feeling anxious for the past six days of the flight, but he was getting more and more worried. Would the orbit they had entered by gravitational manoeuvres around the unknown planet they had discovered lead them to their destination, or were they now heading in a completely different, diametrically opposed direction? He asked himself this question over and over again without finding an answer.

  Oliver’s voice jolted him awake. The boy appeared at the entrance hatch in his usual cheerful mood. James could not hear what he said, Ashley’s retort only.

  ‘Please don’t tell us that you have two pieces of news, like good news and bad news,’ she said.

  ‘I always have only good news,’ said Oliver with a smile. ‘The engine system is working perfectly, the reactor is fine, the speed… Well, you can see for yourself. I just need to know when to go into decel mode.’

  ‘Not now, that’s all I can say,’ James replied gloomily. ‘Without the long-range comms system, we can only rely on long-range sensors, which don’t show anything yet.’

  ‘Okay,’ the boy reacted cheerfully as usual. ‘By the way, I’ve been looking at the data we’ve collected on our planet; it’s amazing!’

  ‘Huh, so that’s what you’ve been doing instead of your regular duties,’ said Ashley with a smile.

  ‘Is it okay that I spent a lot of time fixing the life-support system the day before?’ the boy replied slightly indignantly. ‘And none of you said thanks. Oh, by the way, it was just a –’

  ‘You’ve already told us about your heroic work,’ said James.

  ‘And we thanked you very much,’ Ashley picked up. ‘That nasty oil smell or whatever it was… Oh, by the way…’ she copied Oliver’s intonation very closely, ‘that was the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Okay, okay…’ the boy smiled smugly, ‘let’s call it a day. I’d rather you listen to what I found. Guess how long it takes this planet to make a complete revolution around the Sun. Thirty-two thousand years, unbelievable!’ He waved his hands around. ‘…Just imagine, thirty-two thousand years!’

  ‘It’s an estimate and a very rough figure,’ said Ashley. ‘We’d only been tracking this planet for a few hours, so it’s unlikely we’ve got accurate data.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s unbelievable!’ Oliver went on in the same manner, almost choking with excitement. ‘I just wish we could find something else –’

  ‘No way,’ said James, interrupting him. ‘I didn’t have enough to go out and find another unknown planet yet.

  ‘Why not?’ said Oliver, feigning surprise. ‘That was cool. You can think whatever you want, but at least look at this data. Yes of course, we tracked this object for a short time, but even a short time could gather a lot of information, and our shuttle’s artificial brains were not lazy. We have indeed discovered a new planet in the solar system –’

  ‘Cut your jet and ground,’ James interrupted that very emotional monologue. ‘All these data are still to be proved. And, if I’m not mistaken, not every celestial body orbiting the Sun can be called a planet.’

  ‘Not everyone,’ the boy agreed, no longer waving his hands but keeping the same spirit of enthusiasm, ‘anyway, we’ve enough data to classify this particular celestial body as a planet…’ He intonated the last word, waving his hands again. ‘Look, this object is larger than all known Kuiper belt and Oort cloud objects. The mass is approximated, okay, but it’s a bit more than Mercury’s mass anyway. By the way, this has led us to speculate about its internal structure, which is quite different from any other known object in this part of the system, it’s the first. Secondly, we haven’t found any satellites, okay, but the absence of satellites means nothing. The absence of mass-matched objects in the immediate vicinity means a lot. That means our object has cleared the space around it –’

  ‘What about the planetoid in orbit around which we encountered the supply ship?’ Ashley asked, joining the conversation.

  ‘Nothing,’ Oliver replied with a smug look as if it were his own personal achievement. ‘The planetoid is too far away to interact with our planet… Well, I mean, they have no effect on each other. As you have to know, but maybe you don’t, the International Astronomical Union recognises a celestial body as a planet if: it orbits the Sun, has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium – in short, it’s almost round – and, finally, it has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit. We… I mean, the object we discovered has all three, so it’s a planet in the full sense of the word. I mean, not a dwarf planet like Eris or Pluto, but a full-fledged planet of the Solar system.’

  After finishing his lecture, the boy sat down in the commander’s chair with a smug look.

  ‘Fascinating,’ said James. ‘Just tell me please what all this has to do with our mission.’

  ‘We-ell,’ Oliver stretched, ‘I dunno what the mission description says, but we shouldn’t have passed anything like that anyway.’

  ‘We hadn’t passed,’ said Ashley, smiling, and added suddenly, ‘Jimmy, aren’t you hungry? I’ll get you something to eat.’ She got up from her seat and headed toward the entrance hatch.

  ‘Uh-oh, I see, she’s seriously interested in you,’ Oliver whispered, leaning towards James and giggling. ‘Don’t waste your time, man,’ he added more firmly, reached out his hand and patted James on the shoulder.

  James felt his cheeks get hot and glanced furtively at Ashley. Had she heard the boy’s words? There was no reaction from her side; apparently, she heard nothing. He exhaled in relief and mumbled, ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘Well, she cares about you so much,’ Oliver continued with a sly smile and louder, as Ashley had already left the command section.

  ‘T’s nothing like that,’ James said, still feeling himself embarrassed.

  ‘She does, she does, I see,’ the boy laughed, bouncing in a chair.

  ‘You know a lot,’ James grumbled, rising from his seat. It was a good time to stretch.

  ‘What kinda problem?’ said Oliver cheerfully. ‘In my experience –’

  ‘Your?’ James interrupted him, almost choking. ‘Experience?’

  ‘You’d think I had no girlfriends,’ the boy said importantly.

  ‘Look, Oliver…’ James grinned. The boy’s manner seemed amusing in this case. ‘If you helped her with homework, it doesn’t mean she was your girlfriend.’

  ‘We-ell…’ Oliver stretched, ‘not only –’

  ‘Okay, just honestly, did you sleep with her?’

  Oliver shook his head in the negative.

  ‘…Aha!’

  ‘Huh, you’d think that would be the most important thing in a relationship,’ said Oliver, looking a little embarrassed.

  ‘It’s… well, how can I put it…’ James patted the boy’s shoulder condescendingly. ‘It’s the base of a relationship. Everything else comes with it.’

  Oliver opened his mouth, obviously having an objection, but had no time to say a word. Ashley came back with two dry-ration packs in her hands. She held one out to James.

  ‘What about me?’ asked Oliver.

  ‘You had plenty of time to take one yourself,’ said the girl, ‘but James was here all the time.’

  ‘Aha! Aha! I told you so!’ Oliver jumped in his chair again with a snide smile on his face.

  ‘Shut up, kid,’ James threw, disgruntled.

  ‘Oh yeah, as usual, shut up, kid,’ Oliver replied in a deliberately resentful tone with the same snide smile. Ashley shifted her eyebrows.

  ‘What’s you’re talking about?’ she asked.

  ‘Never mind,’ James hastily interjected, back to the flight control station. ‘Oliver, tell me what we have with the engine system.’

  ‘I told you, all under my control,’ said the boy, leaning back in the commanding chair.

  ‘How long ago did you look at the readings?’

  ‘You two are so boring.’ With these words, Oliver got up from the chair, visibly reluctant, and headed towards the engineering station. ‘Nothing groundbreaking,’ he continued, looking at the panel screen. ‘One of the pressure sensors is glitching, if that’s what you mean. I know about it, but that means nothing.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said James.

  ‘Bet!’ replied Oliver carelessly. ‘All the other sensors work fine; we’ve no problem.’

  ‘What do these sensors show us?’

  ‘Well, to see it, I need to look at the flight control station,’ said Oliver. ‘By the way, you’re closer to it and can do it yourself.’

  ‘Can’t you see I’m eating,’ said James, unpacking his dry-rations pack. The boy stood up from the commander’s chair, made a step towards the flight control station, and leaned over. Suddenly, he smirked snidely and slid his fingers over the touchscreen control panel.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ cried Ashley, it was too late. Suddenly, James felt his body lose weight. The young rascal had switched off the artificial gravity system.

  ‘This is a survival test for you two!’ he exclaimed, floating up the flight control station. James banged his knee on the nearby console’s edge and so unsuccessfully felt a sharp pain and swore involuntarily.

  ‘I hate zero gravity!’ Ashley’s annoyed voice came to him. The package of dry rations had fallen out of the girl’s hands when the artificial gravity was switched off and was now floating somewhere between the engineering and the long-range sensor station.

  ‘You’re such a –’ James hit something again, this time with his shoulder. ‘I hope you didn’t steer us back to your favourite planet.’

  ‘Relax, I didn’t.’ Oliver soared almost vertically over the middle of the command section with a smug look. ‘I think it would be cool, though,’ he continued. ‘We really didn’t know everything about our discovery. Like whether this planet has satellites, which is important.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing else for us to do.’

  ‘We’re explorers, remember?’ Oliver smirked. ‘What was Tycho Brahe’s motto? Something like non fasces, non… er, how-did-he-say…’

  ‘Uh huh, neither this nor that, just knowledge.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid that you and all of us with you could suffer the baker’s fate?’ asked James with a laugh.

  ‘What baker?’

  ‘The Hunting of the Snark,’ said James and continued, ‘I shall softly and suddenly vanish away – and the notion I cannot endure.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ the boy waved his hand. ‘But as you have to remember, that can only happen if the Snark turns out to be a Boojum, right? In our case, if the planet turns out to be… um… a black hole, for example, that’s impossible.’

  ‘You’re forgetting one important thing…’ James made another circle over the flight control station, ‘the Snark is the Boojum.’

  ‘Who said that?’ Oliver replied.

  ‘Lewis Carroll himself,’ James said.

  ‘No way!’

  ‘It’s the pure truth. He wrote about it in a letter to one of his… hmm, little girls.’

  ‘The Hunting of the Snark?’ said Ashley. Seemingly, she had already adjusted to zero gravity and looked like her usual self again. ‘I read it but didn’t really get it.’

  ‘Nobody got it,’ said James, ‘because –’

  ‘It’s a very philosophical thing,’ Oliver uttered meaningfully, taking a second lap around the control room.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ James picked up sarcastically, ‘a kinda allegory of searching for the meaning of life.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Nothing like that.’ James laughed. ‘Old Carroll made a joke, just for fun, but somehow everyone thought it was something sorta.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Oliver surely.

  ‘Possible. Carroll liked to play games like that.’ James suddenly found that floating in weightlessness was easy and pleasant, and the tension of the last few days somehow disappeared without a trace. ‘They told me you had been to her,’ he began, ‘and mentioned me to him. She gave me a good character, but said I could not swim.’

  ‘…He sent them word I had not gone,’ Ashley picked up with a smile, ‘we know it to be true. If she should push the matter on, what would become of you?’

  At the next moment, all three of them continued altogether in a chant, circling around the command section one after another,

  ‘…I gave her one, they gave him two,

  you gave us three or more;

  they all returned from him to you,

  though they were mine before.’

  James did not immediately hear a seemingly unusual, lingering sound that came almost simultaneously with the last words of their recitation. And he did not immediately realise that it was an external communication signal.

  ‘Someone’s calling,’ said he. ‘Ashley, tell ‘em we’re not going to buy anything, subscribe to any new streaming service and join the Stop Global Cooling Society.’

  The girl gave him an incomprehensible look and then, probably having heard the signal herself, reached for the control panel.

  ‘Endurance to ESV One,’ came a voice over the loudspeaker.

  ‘Endurance?’ Ashley uttered as if in surprise. ‘Endurance!’ she cried, ‘it’s Endurance!’

  ‘ESV One, can you hear us?’ James did not recognise the voice. He never radioed with the spacecraft’s crew.

  ‘We can,’ Ashley whispered in a faint voice.

  ‘Louder,’ said James.

  ‘We can hear you,’ Ashley repeated a little louder.

  ‘This is Wilson,’ came from the loudspeaker. ‘To whom am I speaking?’

  ‘This is Leverton,’ Ashley reacted not immediately, and James remembered when and where he heard that name. ‘Lieutenant Leverton… uh… reports –’ Ashley tried to continue but stopped.

  ‘Leverton?’ There was a distinct note of surprise in the Deputy Mission Commander’s voice. ‘Where is Major Jamison?’

  Ashley was clearly confused, having no reply.

  ‘Say that it’s a long story,’ James whispered.

  ‘This is… long story, sir,’ said Ashley and giggled nervously. James thought he heard Wilson either hemmed or coughed.

  ‘He might think we had gone a bit mad here,’ he whispered to Oliver.

  ‘Okay… We don’t have much time,’ Wilson’s voice came again after a short pause. ‘Prepare to go into deceleration mode. We’re coming after you.’

  ‘Uh… yes, sir,’ Ashley responded more confidently.

  ‘As speeds equalise,’ came from the loudspeaker, ‘approach to within ten metres. Can you do it?’

  ‘Acknowledged, Endurance,’ said James and repeated the instructions. ‘Crew, prepare to go into deceleration mode.’ He heard Wilson mutter something along the lines of ‘What’s going on out there?’ but there was no continuation.

  The hours that followed were later recollected by James as a strange dream in the night. It was a dream with no beginning and no end, in which events changed chaotically, without any connection. He remembered activating the deceleration mode and making sure that Ashley and Oliver had moved their seats to the correct position. He remembered feeling the overload, but not when it went away. He also remembered Oliver’s voice suddenly coming to him, as if from somewhere far away, ‘Docking port is ready.’

  James could not see Endurance on the main viewscreen, but he could see the sensor readings. The distance to the nearest object was decreasing, and the speed readings of the shuttle and the object were closing in.

  ‘Speeds have leveled off,’ he reported, not knowing to whom, more to himself.

  ‘Attention, ESV One. Prepare for docking,’ came the voice over the loudspeaker.

  ‘Ready for docking, ESV Bowman… uh… One,’ said Ashley and put her hand over her mouth as if she had said something she should not have.

  None of them said another word. For a moment, James thought he could feel the shuttle shaking, but then he decided it was just his imagination.

  ‘Docking complete,’ came a voice suddenly. James did not immediately realise it was not the shuttle’s artificial intelligence. The voice came from the external communication loudspeaker.

  ‘Checking the docking port,’ Oliver reported. ‘…The docking port is verified.’

  James breathed a sigh of relief and looked around the control section, mentally noting from Ashley’s and Oliver’s faces that they were now feeling the same sense of relief that he was. In the silence that followed, James no longer heard the instruments or his friends breathing, just ringing in his ears.

  ‘That was cool,’ Oliver said after the longest pause. James closed his eyes for a second, feeling dead tired now, then he unfastened seat belts, not without difficulty, for his arms did not obey him very well, and got up from his chair, looked at his friends.

  ‘It’s been an honour serving with you,’ said he slowly.

  ‘It’s been an honour for us too,’ Ashley echoed.

  There was a pause for a while again. The only sounds James could hear were those made by the instruments and the breathing of Ashley, who was sitting closest to him. Oliver perked up suddenly.

  ‘Hey, you wanna say, that’s all?’ he asked perplexedly, looking at James and then at Ashley with a pensive expression on his face. ‘I do believe the best part is just beginning. And as you know –’ he paused, and then smiled and winked, ‘through the mouth of a child the truth speaks.’