String Theory_ Cohesion (Book 1) - Jeffrey Lang [3]
Chapter 1
Disaster minus 334 minutes
Tom Paris was thinking about mushrooms.
He knew he shouldn’t; he knew he should be thinking about what was immediately in front of him, both tangible (that is, the flight controller’s console) and intangible (the sector of space they were entering), but it was difficult to stay focused so late in a shift, especially when nothing was happening.
Not for the first time, Tom found himself recalling the first words his Academy flight instructor said on the first day of classes: “Piloting a starship,” Professor Heyer had begun, “is really boring.” Tom remembered the sound of twoscore styluses scratching on twoscore padds as every student (except for Tom) captured that immortal thought for posterity. Tom had merely watched the professor, who, interestingly, was watching the class. Heyer’s gaze lit on him, and they locked eyes as she completed the thought. “Except, of course, when it’s not.”
Tom had smirked then, thinking, Ah, well, that’s the part I’m here for.
Years had passed, but Tom had learned and relearned the lesson over and over, always more and more impressed by his teacher’s wisdom: piloting a starship usually was unbelievably, breathtakingly, mind-numbingly dull. The trick was to stay alert, to always know that the fatally dull could instantly turn merely fatal.
“The pilot’s job,” Professor Heyer had continued in that lecture, “is to constantly sample the environment, to devise methods to determine when something is going to happen before it happens. If you rely only on your instruments, you will die at your post someday. Maybe not immediately, maybe not for a long time, but someday.”
Cheerful woman, the professor. She had recommended that helmsmen (or “pilots,” as she insisted on calling them) replicate thin-soled shoes so they could feel the deck plates underneath their feet. “A good pilot can tell an engineer when the engines need tuning,” she claimed. Unfortunately, the professor had never indicated whether you should mention untuned engines to the chief engineer if you also happened to sleep with the chief engineer. Tom, as usual, was left to navigate that uncharted and dangerous expanse on his own.
Tom scanned the instruments, half-listened to the bridge chatter and, yes, felt for the vibration of the deck plates under his feet. With no false sense of modesty, Tom Paris knew that he was among the best starship pilots of his generation. Driving a large, powerful, maneuverable spacecraft like Voyager was more than he could have ever asked for back in that classroom so many years ago. If Professor Heyer walked through the turbolift door and asked to speak to the pilot, Tom Paris knew that he would be able to raise his hand and answer proudly, “Me. I’m the pilot.”
And this was a fine thing indeed, but (and this was important), at the same time, Tom also knew that he needed to occupy a small corner of his mind with something else—a counterbalancing piece of consciousness that prevented the rest of his brain from spiraling down into a singularity of boredom.
Some days, he thought about his holoprograms, whatever project that currently might be. The kernel of the idea that had become Sandrine’s had taken root during one particularly dull shift a few years earlier. Other days, Tom mentally scanned his ever-growing collection of films and serials from the twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries. If he were given to self-analysis, Tom might wonder why he was so fascinated with the old fantasy dramas, but he wasn’t, so he didn’t. All he knew was that they were simultaneously sweet and hilarious, especially the oldest from the twentieth century.
Two days ago, he had found buried deep in the library computer two chapters of a serial about a square-jawed heroic type named Commando Cody who came equipped with a jetpack, rocket ship, several robots, and a scantily clad female sidekick. (Or was she a villain? Tom wasn’t sure.) Everything about the films, right down