Chapter 4: Oh Babe, I Hate to Go...

Gail Taylor woke about three thirty in the morning. For some reason her throat seemed like it was filled with cobwebs, and she was a little hyper, not something she was used to.

She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of ice water and sipped it slowly. The security guard on duty nodded to her. "Good morning, Dr. Taylor."

"It's too early to decide if it's good or bad. Have a nice day." With that she retired again. She was a tall dark-haired woman; medium built and wore a tracksuit to sleep in. Guards were a fact of life of late; she lived with it.

Back in bed, she blessedly went right back to sleep and was grateful.

It happened slowly.

She dreamed. She thought she was in a vast building, something like a football stadium or basketball arena. She let impressions trickle in, savoring them in a way where curiosity was restrained, but not absent.

Awareness grew slowly, but steadily. She realized what she was sensing wasn't the vast, empty void she'd first thought. There were levels and partitions. As she slowly grew accustomed to the complexity, she realized that there were people around her, going about unknowable tasks.

The top level, she gradually realized, was where the activity seemed to be centered or focused. It was all fuzzy, though, like looking through a shimmering waterfall with a heavy fog on the other side.

She looked around the center of the activity. It was a large chamber, with a lot of people doing those unknowable things, as everyone else she saw were doing elsewhere in that ship. That's what it was, she'd realized, a ship.

Something tickled her thoughts, demanding her attention. It was a computer console, one of the majority in this compartment that was untenanted.

She sat down in her dream and regarded it. Her mind seemed to flow effortlessly, highlighting ideas and concepts. There was a part of the console that had a solid green dot, surrounded by four rings of varying colors, ranging from light blue, to bright red.

She grinned. She was aboard the starship Enterprise, sitting at Spock's position. These were the Enterprise's shields. She laughed at her cleverness. She studied the four controls that clearly controlled the four layers.

She couldn't understand why she could knew these things -- but then this was a dream. Why shouldn't she understand and know things when it was just a dream?

Three of the layers were dead; she understood that she couldn't activate them. The blue ring, the closest one, she could activate. She raised it to the first level.

She was unprepared for the consternation of the people around her. They were clearly upset, looking around, trying to figure out what had happened.

The shields were half the console. She turned her attention to the other half. Weapons, the word whispered inside her head. There were six of them. Looking at them, two she understood. The first was for internal security. Like stun guns, only she could direct them from the console.

She looked around, still able to see anywhere on the vessel she wanted. Walls didn't seem to be more than hazy lines in her head. A man was lying in bed, reading a book. Why not? He was going to think he just fell asleep! She tested the weapon; indeed he slumped. Gail could see he was just asleep. She had no idea how she could read his vital signs. Was this like a ship-wide tricorder?

The next weapon she understood as well. The first icon was something she thought was a cloud. Cloud 9? The second had a lightning bolt for an icon. That, she decided was 'stunners set on lethal' not stun. She knew it wouldn't hurt the ship. She watched as she activated the weapon and saw the flash; she could see that charring of the deck where it had hit ... a spot a considerable distance from anyone.

Gail sensed a stir at the console. She saw an oriental woman waving her hands through Gail's body as if she was trying to touch Gail. She thinks I'm a ghost, Gail deduced.

The oriental woman called and a man joined her. He said something, clearly trying to talk to Gail. She heard nothing, no matter how hard she tried. The woman said something and scribbled on a piece of paper and held it up.

Gail grimaced. Chinese or Japanese; the woman would have had more luck with Greek -- at least Gail could recognize the symbols, even if she couldn't understand them.

The man wrote four characters on a piece of paper as well. She mentally scratched her head. They weren't English; they weren't like the letters the woman had written. They were Arabic, Cyrillic or maybe even Hebrew. She knew she looked Semitic, even though her family hailed from Wales.

The woman laughed and said something to the man and he laughed as well. He wrote again and this time she understood. "Please stop! Don't do anything else!"

That did it! She jerked awake and sat up. Her body was trembling; she was hungry enough to eat a moose. She was drenched with sweat; her breathing was fast and deep, like she'd run a couple of miles. She hated exercise!

There were too many biological imperatives. She had to eat, drink, and work off the nervous tension ... the urge to pee won. She glanced at the clock on her nightstand and blinked. It was four thirty. It was still dark outside, so it wasn't the afternoon. She laughed and shook her head. This wasn't the first time she'd noticed that her dreams had their own clocks.

She turned on the sink in her bathroom and took handful sip of the tap water. The chlorine smell was overpowering as usual and the water tasted like crap. No one in Las Vegas drank tap water unless there was no choice.

Still, it assuaged her thirst long enough to get into the shower and get rid of the night sweats. Her legs had firmed up and her breathing had returned to normal.

The only problem was that if she closed her eyes for more than a few seconds, she could see the console again. It was unsettling.

She finished her shower keeping her thoughts far away from the console. That woman had sensed or seen her. So had the man. She wanted to get dressed first. Had she appeared dressed in her dream? She normally wore a plain cotton tracksuit, Las Vegas or not. This time of the year, it was thin cotton was all.

About a quarter of five she was in the kitchen, rustling bacon and eggs. The guard grinned. "You're up early, Dr. Taylor."

"Bad dreams," she told him. "Nothing but bad dreams."

"Dr. Taylor, be glad for small favors. I spent almost two years in Afghanistan. The docs said I'm likely to have nightmares for the rest of my life. Meaning no disrespect, ma'am."

She shook her head. "This was confusing more than nasty. I can't explain it."

She turned over the bacon and remembered the console. This time she felt more like a wraith than a ghost as she watched it. The man and woman were gone; everyone else ignored her. Oddly, there was a woman a few feet away from the console, leaning forward to get a better look. She was speaking to a man a few feet away. The woman stood out because she held her hands behind her back, and stayed a distance away from the console.

Gail thought she was hallucinating. The woman had nothing to worry about. The controls were cold and dead; when Gail thought about them, she knew she could activate them, but she didn't.

She sat at the dining room table, long after she finished breakfast, thinking. Her cousin Steve appeared a little after eight. He grinned. "Up early, cuz?"

"Yes," she said evenly.

"Still hoping for that Nobel?"

That was a bright spot; in spite of the fact she knew her sixteen-year-old cousin was jerking her chain.

"Not this time. I thought I was dreaming that I was on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. I just realized it was the bridge of an Ancient spaceship from Stargate."

He chuckled. "I don't suppose I could convince you to fix me bacon and eggs?"

"Call the twins; I'm not going to spend the morning doing this."

He went out of the room and was back in a couple of minutes. "Judy says waffles! She was quite emphatic about the exclamation point after waffles. Bacon, yes. Honestly Gail, I think I rather have waffles than eggs."

"Ask and you shall receive!" she told him. Bacon and waffles were better than bacon and eggs -- she cooked the eggs in the left over bacon fat and everyone said that wasn't healthy.

The guard came out and watched her work. "There are times, Dr. Taylor, when I hate our instructions. We are never to eat what you eat. Ever. Why couldn't you have been a lousy cook like the twins?"

She laughed and kept working.

She used the mood to carry her through the morning. Then she went to her own computer and buried herself in her work, avoiding the dreams of earlier.

Three weeks ago she'd gone to Pasadena and delivered a paper to an astronomy symposium. To say she'd had a mixed reception was to understate it. She was an unemployed astronomer. She was also a billionaire, and she was determined to get a job in her major field based on her own merit, no matter how impossible it was.

Right after last Thanksgiving she'd suffered two major shocks. Her girlfriend of six plus years had stormed out; revealing that the only reason she'd slept with Gail was all those trust funds in Gail's name. A few days later, she'd gone to Seattle and heard from her grandfather. He had early Alzheimer's and was planning on 'checking out' as he described it, in December, when the estate tax laws for the very rich would never be better.

He was the patriarch head of the family fortune -- and he'd picked her from the current crop of CEO wannabes. She explained that she wasn't a CEO wannabe past, present or future -- and he'd laughed. "Which is why you've got the job!"

She'd come home, intent on erasing both events from her mind. Her one hope to get a job as an astronomer was to make an important discovery.

She had -- sort of. Maybe every hundred thousand years a star was ejected from the Milky Way galaxy at a velocity that violated most speed limits. These were called 'hyper-velocity' stars. Gail had known of such, but her main interest was the dynamics of extra-galactic globular clusters.

Not long after she started trying to find the mother lode -- a globular cluster that had originated in another galaxy -- she noticed a blue star not far from her favorite globular -- the cluster she'd done her doctoral dissertation on. Blue giants are young; she, like everyone else, had assumed it was a foreground star and not given it a second thought. Theory said if would go supernova before it was twenty million years old. Star ages were a function of the spectral color and size of the star. Theory said that star was fifteen million years old. Not hardly worth waiting for it to supernova!

Except it was there, and since it was close to cluster she was measuring, she measured it too, and found that it belonged to the class of speeders and it was outside the galaxy.

But hey, she'd discovered it! Number sixteen on the list of hyper-velocity stars. Astronomy was big on being first. Being sixteenth hardly counted. She got an "atta-girl" from the dean of hyper-velocity stars (he'd discovered eight of the sixteen known) and nothing else.

A few days later she was looking at a spectrographic plate of another globular. A lot of individual stars had been resolved, showing their spectra. There had been one that stood out; she was sensitive to the red shifts involved with hyper-velocity stars -- this looked like one. But it was one star just off center in globular cluster. There were a quarter million stars in that cluster and while blue giants weren't that common, they were rare enough to deserve a look.

One of her hallmarks was careful measurements. She never ever gotten one she'd published wrong. Astronomical measurements are unbelievably sensitive to bad data. An extra-galactic globular cluster was thirty or forty thousand light years away at the very least. The impact of missing a star's real location on a plate by a millimeter would have put the star moving faster than light.

So, she checked her work very, very carefully.

She was her grandfather's niece. No big. Not even the family had guessed ahead of time who was going to receive the hand-off of the baton. The family reaction to her sudden "good fortune" was stunned surprise, followed by massive anger that they'd been passed over. Outside the family it was noted by people who were concerned about such things, but didn't make the news.

The bottom line though was that she could easily be able to afford to buy telescope time, even before her grandfather died and afterwards observatories lined up to sell time to her. Not, mind you, any of them would offer her a position.

The next set of data was fourteen months younger than the first. She was presented with a quandary. The star she was interested in, was, according to the new data, moving seven kilometers per second faster than the first set of data had shown. It was just barely out of the error bar of the possible error in her first data.

She debated trying for a third data point, unsure what was right. Sometime that night she realized what she was sure was the truth. What if the numbers were right? What if the star was a cosmic jaywalker -- not just a star that had wandered onto a deserted country road in the middle of the night -- but one who was dashing across a freeway at rush hour, a freeway clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic?

If the one star was showing that large of velocity increase, there was another nearby likely showing a velocity increase that was even greater.

She couldn't find it in any of the plates she had. Still sure, she resorted to brute force: she began to assemble a model of the local area of the cluster, star by painful star. Finally, in a plate nearly twenty years old, she found the little pimple on the jaywalker's ass. In an plate taken in 1990 she found the spectrum she needed: the jaywalker was headed for a star that it was currently obscuring.

She ran the numbers; eventually she was sure. At first, the thought of being the first one to watch a pair of stars merge had been heady wine. Except, she was just one person, and she wasn't going to command much in the universe of resources to watch the event. It wasn't her area of interest, and she would have to struggle to learn the science in the few months before the stars merged. The awful truth: if she tried to hog this, she was going to do immeasurable damage to science. And no one in the astronomy community would ever forgive her.

Instead, she prepared a paper, with nothing but the bare fact that the two stars were about to merge. She already had figured out that everyone was going to laugh at her. It just wasn't possible not to. "The fireworks are due to reach their peak about 11 PM, EST on July 4th." She wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't made the calculations.

She had been gifted with the house she lived in when she was eighteen, but she'd already lived there for six years by then. It had been her grandfather's golf retreat, situated in the middle of a subdivision on a golf course near downtown Las Vegas and wasn't far from UNLV.

Over the years, before her grandfather died, she had three family members move in. Judith and Katherine Montgomery, twins from her mother's side of the family, were sophomores at UNLV when her grandfather died. And then there was her cousin, Steve Taylor, from her father's side of the family. He was sixteen when he started at UNLV, a math major, starting a few months before her grandfather had died.

She'd learned the hard way about the lies that universities told. No one had mentioned to her, until just weeks before she presented her thesis, that she had no future in astronomy. There were thirty or forty applicants for every job, and most of the successful applicants had built up friendships to grease the way. She had none. She told Steve about the lies. He hadn't believed her, until he did his own research. The rage you feel when you find out the people you thought were helping you achieve your dreams -- but who were there merely to part you with your money -- is terrible. And it didn't matter if you were wealthy or not. The thought of people stealing dreams makes you furious no matter how deep your pockets are.

Steve, as she said, was a genius. He'd helped her prepare her paper. She had a web site were everything was posted. Her code, her plates, her calculations, her data. Sure enough the listeners had been 80% believing it was a hoax, and 20% who told the rest she'd never gotten a measurement wrong, to their knowledge.

It turned out to be a topic that too many people had a vested interests in not to be sure. The data was there; everything was there. There was three weeks to go now before the two stars would merge. People with much larger computers than she had available had made better measurements than she could ever hope to. The two stars were going to merge. The jury was still out on how spectacular an event it was going to be. At forty thousand light years, you can't just plot the groove the stars were going to follow.

The best guess was that the jaywalker was going to hit the victim, going at vectors that totaled 85% degrees -- a sideways swipe -- from each other. The stars were already measurably elongated. Since the interloper was four times the mass of the smaller victim, the longer streamers were from the victim.

When she'd given her presentation they had been about two months from merging ... the jaywalker had not been quite as far as Jupiter was from the sun. Four weeks later they were advancing on each other at about a million kilometers per hour and the merge was less than a month away.

She had made a decision that she was going to be satisfied with an honorable mention. As the day got closer, fewer and fewer researchers mentioned her contribution, concentrating on what part their own research was going to play. It was a little frustrating, but she told herself she had expected it.

She did her latest series of measurements, finding nothing new.

At a little after four in the afternoon the guard spoke on the intercom. "PB and J sandwiches in the pantry!"

That was a warning that their security had been breached. "PB" was code that security had pushed the panic button alerting the local authorities -- and the lawyers -- while "pantry" was code for "go to the panic room."

The panic room was a secure room in the middle of the house, with no windows and only one door. It was armored and no one could get inside unless someone inside let them inside -- or you had to expend hours with a cutting torch or detonated some serious explosives.

Still, she walked to the living room, not the panic room.

The guard was aghast. "Dr. Taylor ... you need to get secure!"

She peeped out the window. There were two HumVees and a large army truck outside. Soldiers were pouring out of the truck, heading in either direction around the house. The group of three people headed for the front door were ones she recognized from her earlier dream.

"I think they've come to talk to me," she said with aplomb. "We will want to be careful. Tell Steve to take care of the twins. Tell him this time there are a lot more than two who've come calling.

"Oh, and tell the PD to be careful they don't start shooting until they know for sure who they are shooting at."