The Age Atomic

THIRTY-FOUR

The man stirred in his bunk. How long he’d been asleep, he wasn’t sure. Time passed strangely where he was, although maybe that was his imagination. Years of solitude, years of travel had taken their toll.

The signal was a constant pulsing tone, not loud enough to have woken him, just loud enough to have entered his dreams, the signal becoming a flashing blue light, the light of the gap between one universe and the next.

The man rubbed his good eye and pulled thick fingers through his white beard, and then he lay on his bunk and stared at the ceiling of the ship as the tone continued.

Maybe this was a dream too. Maybe the signal was his imagination, an auditory hallucination. Maybe it was the outside tricking him. It had a habit of doing that; he’d discovered many places on his travels, some of which were cities, whole countries where life went on. Others were places that seemed to be alive themselves.

And they liked to trick him, make him see things, make him hear things. After years of this the man wasn’t sure what was real, not anymore. Maybe he’d died a long time ago, on that day when the ice was thick and the fog was deep, the day he’d stepped into it and left the world.

“Sir?”

The man jolted on the bunk, suddenly wide awake. He sat up too quickly, his hand pressing his forehead as the room spun. He waited a moment, then swallowed and glanced at the door to the flight deck. On the control panel in front of the pilot’s seat he could see one of the row of orange lights flashing in time with the tone.

A shadow moved around the flight deck.

“I have located the source,” said the voice.

“A signal? From the city?”

“I believe this is what you have been waiting for, sir.”

The man heart raced as he listened to the tone. He blinked. The signal was… wait, the signal was…

He looked back to the ceiling. “That’s not a regular transmission.”

The shadow moved, but the other voice said nothing.

The man swung himself from his bunk, the end of his wooden leg loud against the floor of the ship. He reached for his walking stick, and went to heave himself to a standing position, but then he paused, head cocked, looking at the floor and listening, listening.

“I recognize it. The signal, it’s-”

“I quite agree,” said the other voice.

The man pulled himself up and stumbled into the cockpit, using the pilot’s chair to kill his momentum as he dropped his walking stick and stared through the main window. Outside the fog was thinning; the lights of the city were faintly visible as a multicolored smudge of twinkling stars. The frame of the bridge was barely there, a smudge dissolving into the orangey-grey world.

The man gripped the top of the pilot’s seat and licked his lips. He was alone in the cockpit. He was alone in the entire ship.

He allowed himself a small smile.

“It’s him, isn’t it?”

There was a pause, and then a second voice sounded from somewhere behind him. “I believe so.”

“So, he found his way back.”

“As you once predicted, sir. The arc of his transit returned him to the Empire State.”

The man nodded. “Like a comet in orbit around the sun.” Then he laughed, and swung himself around into the pilot’s seat. He smoothed down his mustache and beard, and glanced across the controls with his one good eye. He frowned, and lifted the eye patch that covered the other, and squinted. Satisfied, he let the eye patch flip back into place, and he clapped his hands and rubbed them together.

“I do believe we shall be in time for tea. Byron?”

“Yes, Captain Carson?”

“Trace the signal, and get a lock on its position. We shall collect them en route to Grand Central.”

“Confirmed. Tether release in five seconds.”

Captain Carson clapped his hands again and laughed. After all this time, they were going home.