A Drift

This story is by Gary Little and was part of our 2017 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the Spring Writing Contest stories here.

Ben Edwards drifted down the corridor with the ease of a lifetime spent in microgravity. Using a single digit on right or left hand he gently pulled himself along using the corridor come-a-longs. Preoccupied with the latest problem in Engineering, he was startled by the comm-system broadcasting his name.

“Chief Engineer Edwards, please contact the Bridge.”

Merlin, he thought to his AI, what do …

“Crap, Merlin where are ya when I need ya? Aww, double crap!” Ben swore. He realized why Merlin was not answering. He and his artificially intelligent personal assistant were going through an upgrade. Merlin’s circuitry had been chelated out of Ben’s body to make way for that upgrade. Merlin was not with him to answer that comm. The only comm devices he could use were next to hatches.

Once a minute. That’s the timing for the Chief Engineer. Once a minute that page would echo the corridors until he found a hatch to answer it. He quickened his pace a bit.

“Chief Engineer Edwards, please contact the Bridge.”

“Aww, come on … let me find a hatch for crying out loud,” he begged no one in particular.

“Finally!” He grabbed the handles near the hatch and let his arms absorb his momentum.

“Chief Engineer Edwards, please contact the Bridge.”

“Alright already,” and he slapped the comm button. “This is Edwards. Tell Captain MacDonald I’m on my way.” Nothing. He looked at the comm panel. Dead. No telltale lights indicating status. He unlatched the panel and saw why. It had never been connected. Not unusual in this portion of the ship.

“Chief Engineer Edwards, please contact the Bridge.”

Ben slammed the panel back into place, dogged the latches and pondered his next move. He looked at the corridor information plate near the hatch and mumbled to himself as he planned his route to a working comm-panel. He pushed off and now finger flicked come-a-longs in a bit more of a hurry.

“Chief Engineer Edwards, please contact the Bridge.”

“Aww fer cryin’ out loud I’m coming! I’m coming!”

Another minute passed as Ben moved towards his target.

“Chief Engineer Edwards, please contact the Bridge.”

“Crap …” Ben said letting loose a string of expletives that could peel the corridor paint.

He came to an intersection, did a somersault and a couple of finger flicks, and he floated down the right corridor to a hatch with an active comm-panel. He grabbed the hatch handles to kill his momentum and hit the Push-To-Talk button on the comm panel.

“Edwards, I’m on my way,” Ben said, slapped the Comm-System closed, pulled himself through the hatch, and touched the big red Latch button on the inside control/comm panel. The hatch he had just passed through slid shut as he executed a lifetime practiced microgravity flip to face the far bulkhead and realized his mistake. Far bigger than he expected, he did not have enough momentum to carry him to the distant hatch. Reverse flip and grab … now he could not reach the hatch he had just closed.

He was in the Wabbit Warrens in the North end of the Engineering Deck. The Warrens were a maze of corridors and empty bays. An engineer, partial to ancient animation, had temporarily written Wabbit on the design documents and it had stuck. There were well-known paths through the Wabbit Warrens, and there were less well-known paths.

He had taken a shortcut, one of the less well-known paths. The ship-wide call had echoed through the corridors again and again and that, and the fact he did not have Merlin to answer that call irritated him. His only thought was to turn off that infernal announcement. Now …

He was adrift. Going adrift happened to everyone, and now it had happened to him, again. Ben was in an empty sphere of a bay, with no way to reach the hatch on either side.

“Well shit,” he muttered to himself, “what a revoltin’ development this is.”

He took the time to think. Rule one in zero G: Never panic. Rule two: Know where you are. Rule three: Look where you are going. Rule four: Never break rules one through three.

“So much for rules two and three,” he muttered to himself. “How do I get to a god-damned hatch? Aww no … don’t think that … to late damn it … And to top it off, I think I gotta go pee.”

He began to kick and flail his arms and legs to get some kind of momentum towards any wall. He tried the breaststroke. Nothing. He tried a dolphin kick. Nothing. He tried freestyle. Nothing. He finished with a full blown expletive-laced tantrum and curled up into the fetal position.

Still adrift, all he got for his efforts was a multi-axis spin that was going to make him puke. He managed to cancel the spin with some well timed counter kicks and arm movements. Minutes later, he drifted in the precise center of the bay, fifty meters from either hatch, the urge to pee a bit stronger.

He considered that for a moment. “I’m about 118 kilograms. What acceleration would I get? Urine is the same as water, so I’d have to accelerate the stream at …” his face screwed up in thought and collapsed into hopelessness, “crap, I haven’t been able to piss that hard for ten years. And now it is official. I need to pee.”

He drifted, a light green ship suit covered beach ball. Mid-sixties, Ben had been either bridge or engineering crew for thirty years. He had spent twenty years in microgravity. Hence, his wonderful round shape. He wiped the sweat from his balding, gray-haired forehead. “Perfect, this is just so god-damned perfect,” he swore to the hatches he could not reach.

“Cool it, Edwards. Getting angry don’t help. What have I got?” He began to rifle through the copious pockets of his engineering ship suit. A few ration wrappers from his lunch. Handkerchief. Pocket-lint. And of course his ever present multi-tool.

“Throw the wrappers? No bloody way,” he said to himself. “Maybe, if they were a half a kilo and I had a few dozen of them. Hey … maybe the ship suit?” He never even considered throwing the multi-tool. He knew it’s mass. He knew it would not be enough, and he would rather be dead than without the tool.

He slipped the tools lanyard on his wrist, and with practiced ease stripped his ship suit off. The end result was more sweat, a greater urge to pee, and a rotund 60-year-old male nude floating in the middle of the bay.

Ben wadded up the suit and estimated its usability. “Damn … not enough mass.” A breeze cooled the sweat on his right side and made an errant leg of the suit wave a bit. He had a slight rotation, and the breeze was gone almost as soon as he had felt it.

He used a leg kick to give himself a turn and searched the far wall. “Son of a bitch … the ventilation system.” He was looking at a grill in the far bulkhead. He moved the suit in his hand a bit, and sure enough, the leg fluttered again. He had found the source of that breeze. Slight, but it was there. Could it help?

“Ok, so what do I need? Sail? Parachute? No, those take too much rigging. All I got is a quadruple sized ship suit. I need surface area, not rigging.” He stretched the suit out. Estimated cuts and lengths in his engineer’s eye. “Yes … maybe” he mumbled to himself as he took his multi-tool and began cutting the suit into strips.

One nice thing about ship suits, they were very light, rip-stop material, and could be used in so many ways. His multi-tool had a nice little flat blade that was designed to heat and seal suit material.

Strip after strip he cut from his suit and married them end to end with his tool. A rat’s nest of light green spaghetti floated around him as his streamer grew longer and longer. He did not notice the running end of the streamer drifting into the air current he was planning on sailing.

“Damn … damn … ouch … that’s hot!” he said shaking his right hand and looked at the blister forming on the middle finger tip. Undaunted, that ever growing urge to pee forced him to continue singeing his fingers.

“Oh no you don’t …” he said when he saw the spaghetti bundle drifting away from him. He made a quick grab but missed. “Damn it.” He slipped the multi-tool off his wrist, looped it onto a long piece of suit material he had just cut, and tossed the tool at the fleeing bundle. The tool sailed away, reached the end of it’s arc, and Ben let the momentum carry it through the bundle. He pulled everything back, secured the tool to his wrist again, and looked at the errant bundle. He rolled it all up and stuffed it between his legs. “That’ll keep you from wondering off.”

At last, his streamer drifted into the current of air, fluttered a bit and drifted out. He swore again, “it’s like pushing wet noodles. Maybe it’s too wide.”

He rolled it back up, cut it in half lengthwise and doubled the length of his streamer. It drifted out again. “Hmmm … if I twist it the right way … maybe.”

“No … blew right out … ok … twist it the other way.” More work with the multi-tool, more singed flesh, but he had the twist going the other way.

“I do not have to pee, I do not have to pee,” he muttered to himself as once more he tried his streamer.

“Yes! It was sucked right into the stream! Yes … keep it in the stream, Edwards … Damn this is slow.”

Now he had nothing to do but try to ignore that urgent message from his bladder. “I do not have to pee,” became his mantra as he sailed that streamer.

He wasn’t sure, but maybe, the wall was getting closer. More minutes passed, the need to pee growing stronger.

“Yes … it’s working. Son of a bitch, this is working!” In the back of his mind, he computed the path to the closest urinal.

A minute or two later the streamer fluttered up against the bulkhead and he began to lose some of the drag that had been pulling him. He had enough momentum to get to the hatch. At long last, he grabbed the handhold he had released hours before, just as the hatch opened and a familiar head poked out of it.

Ben dove head first for the hatch.

“Where the hell have you been? I’ve got people looking for you all over the ship, and why are you naked?” asked Owen MacDonald, his commanding officer, and life partner.

For some seconds two rotund bodies tried to occupy the same space as Ben fought his way passed Mac and through a hatch meant to pass only one.

“Move it, Mac, I gotta pee!”