But if the nightmare died, the dream was dead, too.
There was a girl named Susan. I remembered her from a ghost life long gone. I wondered if she was still alive. （Had it been a couple of hours ago? Or a couple of lifetimes?） I supposed she was dangling hairless from cables somewhere, with no memory of a miserable, paranoid giant.
I was so close I could see the ripples of the creature’s skin. The rocks were getting smaller and more accurate. I dodged and wove and skimmed to avoid them. Part of me was just admiring the economy of the thing: no expensive explosives to build and buy, no lasers, no nukes. Just good old kinetic energy: big rocks.
If one of those things had hit the ship I would have been dead. Simple as that.
The only way to avoid them was to outrun them. So I kept running.
The nucleus was staring at me. It was an eye of some kind. I was certain of it.
I was less than a hundred yards away from the nucleus when I let the payload go. Then I ran.
I wasn’t quite out of range when the thing imploded. It was like fireworks—beautiful in a ghastly sort of way. And then there was nothing but a faint trace of glitter and dust…
“I did it!” I screamed. “I did it! I fucking well did it!”
The screen flickered. Horn-rimmed spectacles were staring at me. There was no real face behind them anymore. Just a loose approximation of concern and interest, like a blurred cartoon. “You did it,” he agreed.
“Now, where do I bring this thing down?” I asked.
There was a hesitation, then, “You don’t. We didn’t design it to return. It was a redundancy we had no need for. Too costly, in terms of resources.”
“So what do I do? I just saved the Earth. And now I suffocate out here?”
He nodded. “That’s pretty much it. Yes.”
The lights began to dim. One by one, the controls were going out. I lost my 360-degree perception of the ship. It was just me, strapped to a chair in the middle of nowhere, inside a flying teacup.
“How long do I have?”
“We’re closing down all your systems, but you’ve got a couple of hours, at least. We’re not going to evacuate the remaining air. That would be inhuman.”
“You know, in the world I came from, they would have given me a medal.”
“Obviously, we’re grateful.”
“So you can’t come up with any more tangible way to express your gratitude?”
“Not really. You’re a disposable part. A unit. We can’t mourn you any more than a wasps’ nest mourns the death of a single wasp. It’s not sensible and it’s not viable to bring you back.”
“And you don’t want this kind of firepower coming back toward the Earth, where it could potentially be used against you?”
“As you say.”
And then the screen went dark, with not so much as a good-bye. Do not adjust your set, I thought. Reality is at fault.
You become very aware of your breathing, when you only have a couple of hours of air remaining. In. Hold. Out. Hold. In. Hold. Out. Hold…
I sat there strapped to my seat in the half-dark, and I waited, and I thought. Then I said, “Hello? Is anybody there?”
A beat. The screen flickered with patterns. “Yes?”
“I have a request. Listen. You—you people, machines, whatever you are—you owe me one. Right? I mean I saved all your lives.”
“Continue.”
“I’ve got a couple of hours left. Yes?”
“About fifty-seven minutes.”
“Can you plug me back into the…the real world. The other world. The one I came from?”
“Mm? I don’t know. I’ll see.” Dark screen once more.
I sat and breathed, in and out, in and out, while I waited. I felt very peaceful. If it wasn’t for having less than an hour to live, I’d have felt just great.
The screen glowed. There was no picture, no pattern, no nothing. Just a gentle glow. And a voice, half in my head, half out of it, said, “You got a deal.”
There was a sharp pain at the base of my skull. Then blackness, for several minutes.
Then this.
That was fifteen years ago: 1984. I went back into computers. I own my computer store on the Tottenham Court Road. And now, as we head toward the new millennium, I’m writing this down. This time around, I married Susan. It took me a couple of months to find her. We have a son.
I’m nearly forty. People of my kind don’t live much longer than that, on the whole. Our hearts stop. When you read this, I’ll be dead. You’ll know that I’m dead. You’ll have seen a coffin big enough for two men dropped into a hole.