Kay followed Gram into a small circular
room with a domed ceiling composed of long overlapping panels. Gram stopped at
the center of the room scratching his nose; he appeared to be waiting for
something. While they stood in the small round chamber, Kay attempted to come
to terms with his predicament. Here he was on a spaceship orbiting the Earth; any
normal person in his position would be having a brain aneurism, yet he felt
awe-inspired, this sure beat going home alone to watch television and eat leftover
pizza.
Nothing
seemed to be happening, so Kay cleared his throat and asked, “Aren’t we going
back to Earth? Where’s the ship? A Tear Drop, you said...” He felt eager to see
this space vessel.
Gram
flicked something off his fingers. “Oh, we’re already in it. Curdle will have
the absorption shields up in a moment.”
“But
the room is empty, no controls or anything, how are you going to pilot it down
to the surface?”
Gram
grinned; Kay didn’t like the devious intent that gleamed off the boy’s teeth.
Curdle’s
voice clicked into the room from an unseen speaker system. “Everything is
ready. Prepare yourselves.”
“Prepare
for what?” Kay snorted disapprovingly.
“Have
you ever been in free-fall?” Gram smirked.
Kay
attempted to respond to the question, but had his attention torn away as a
golden yellow light swam across the room seeping through the air like liquid.
He felt a slight tingle on his skin as it washed over him and quickly became
aware that it was immobilizing his movements. Kay found himself stuck in an
awkward pose half facing Gram with his eyes held open and his mouth partially
ajar. He couldn’t breathe; the yellow glow was holding his chest in place, yet
there was no sense of asphyxiation; the energy field appeared to be providing
his body with oxygen.
There
was movement. In his peripheral vision Kay saw the floor slide away under his
feet revealing the empty void below. The domed ceiling began to cascade back
leaving Kay and Gram suspended only by the yellow bubble, all alone. Kay
attempted to say something, yell, scream, anything, but even his vocal cords
were unable to vibrate, he could do nothing but watch as they began to drop
from Gram’s ship and roll down Earth’s gravity well.
At
first the trip wasn’t too bad, there was only an awkward dizzying sensation
instigated by the Earth’s surface speeding by each time the energy ball
rotated. Then they hit the outer layers of the atmosphere. The impact began
quietly, like a slight flutter, but quickly upgraded to airplane turbulence,
then to being hit in the face with a waterfall before, finally, Kay felt as if
he were riding atop a compressed oxygen cylinder with its valve broken clean
off like a bucking bronco through an unending series of brick walls, but unlike
straddling a mad horse, he didn’t have the option of letting go.
As
if the tooth shattering vibrations weren’t enough, Kay had no choice but to
watch as an inferno of fiery red flames erupted around the energy field as it
scrapped through the sea of air molecules. He attempted to whimper in vain
fully believing that he was about to be barbecued.
Thankfully,
the trip through the upper atmosphere ended and the raging glow faded leaving
the bubble fully intact. Kay was able to relax for a few moments as they passed
through the clouds, but quickly realized that the worst part of the trip was
rapidly approaching at an acceleration rate of 9.8 meters per second. Had Kay’s
brain been capable of coherent description, he would have depicted the impact
as what being shot in the stomach by a cannon firing a black hole would have
been like.
The
yellow sphere dissipated but Kay barely noticed. He lay in a small crater left
by the Tear Drop face down on top of an impressively flat heap of pizza boxes
while his limbs seized with a terror they had never before known.
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