Chapter 2

            At the same time, at a distance of over a billion and two hundred million kilometres from Earth, Thomas looked out of the window. From his vantage point through the window of Unity 3, he looked at the extravagant, heavenly vista spread before him. Countless stars, unblinking, in varied colours, just for him. He felt like a god gazing thoughtfully upon his creations.

     A soft chime broke his reverie. He looked at his wrist watch and kicked gently on the floor. He loved floating in the zero gravity environment, he had loved it the first time as a trainee and his fondness for the sensation had grown with the passage of time.

     It occurred to him as he floated towards the middle of the crew chambers of the nearly jumbo jet airplane sized spaceship that the time for his complete freedom was going to come soon.

He glanced at the slightly misted windows of the hibernation capsules as he floated past them, the sleeping faces of the crew were visible fuzzily through the square window fixed in each of the cylinders and the thin swirling mist inside. How they revered him, Thomas William Basset, captain of the Unity 3 space ship, and the preferred choice for promotion to the Albatross class. Warmth dawned in him as he knew that once he achieved the highest rank, he would truly become his own master and would not have to take orders from anyone anymore. From his breast pocket he took out a gold chain with a small pendant, which he always carried with him and gazed lovingly at the small photo lodged in the oval shaped gold pendant. The photo was of his deceased wife Marilyn. Lovingly he gazed at the photo, and thought if only she had been alive he would have convinced her to come along with him. Ruefully he put the pendant back in his pocket and floated away to the cargo section.

Half an hour later, Thomas was back in the cockpit of Unity 3, and had started the reverse hibernation procedure, jokingly called the wake-up call. He looked at the nine hibernation capsules on the right wall of the crew chambers, from which four other crew members and five visiting astronauts were going to wake-up from their sleep of close to two and a half months. Many times, the visitors weren’t astros per-se. They were scientists, many of them with mind boggling PhDs and super-specialties with expertise in the numerous sub-fields of astronomy and of many other sciences. Many a times, the ship carried engineers and technicians, and occasionally observers or assessors specially assigned by the various administration and management councils of the USO for specific tasks.

     Thomas pondered over the point that out of the five visitors which he was carrying, only one had shown the suitability for... “beep…programmed hibernation restoring in 45 seconds…beep”, a sharp automated voice and beeping broke his chain of thoughts, he turned and looked at the control panel built into the wall besides the hibernation capsules, which was studded with a few buttons and a large cell phone like touch screen, where half the screen was flashing bright orange. In one swift move he swivelled his chair around and kicked on the floor, reaching the flashing screen and quickly punching the ‘manual override’ button, the shrill beeping ended and he saw the satisfactory output on the luminescent screen.

     He calculated mentally that it was going to take them nearly three hours to wake up, and then practically another hour for complete biological stability and normalization. He smiled to himself at the perfect timing of his own waking up done beforehand and the tasks executed by him with finesse. With alacrity, he floated back to the pilot’s seat. Settling himself back into the seat he saw the well lit interiors of his beloved ship. With all the separating curtains withdrawn he could see part of the maroon coloured hatch of the cargo section which was unlike the other round hatches on the ship and was almost the size of a standard door but had rounded edges. The maroon hatch stood out against the mostly lacklustre white interior of the spaceship. Thomas quickly set a new alarm for two and a half hours later on his ultra-tough touch screen wrist watch, then without looking at the heavenly view which the windows presented, he focussed his entire attention at one of the many luminescent screens in front of him and settled in to read the what he had procured three months ago from Earth.