“Mark  Hatcher, a very medium, very unremarkable guy, a self-described loser, is dreaming of landing a new job, but still driving a sub-galactic space transporter, when one of his two engines goes out.  As he is trying to call for help, his radio goes out too – he is only a couple of galaxies away from earth, but it might as well be a hundred light years.”

–The Morning Hatcher Fell

Don Martin

Coming Soon!

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The Morning Hatcher Fell

He woke up. He went to work. He came home. Mark Hatcher crossed another day off the calendar of the dreary existence he called “life.”

Regular. Standard. Normal. OK.

Hatcher didn’t really feel anything special that day. He woke up like any other day, knowing he hadn’t really slept long enough, but also knowing it was time to get up or start looking for a new job.

For much of his life, Hatcher piloted a star-bird, thrush class, a sub-galactic short-distance hopper that rarely made any excursions into the area of time. He would shuffle supplies, and perhaps an extra person from one civilization to another, but always in the same era. Sometimes he would listen to the oldies channel, but that was as radical as the time-shifting got.

His small craft, without the benefit of time-alt circuits, was rather limited in its scope of travel, due to its sub-galactic power architecture. Others he knew with less overall experience were mid- and long-hopping to distant hypergroup sector areas, moving forward and back in time, too, in order to keep the logistics working and running smoothly.

He had about decided that life, was like accidental flatulence on a crowded elevator. It may make you smile for a short time, and then it’s gone, leaving only a faint whiff of the drama it was once.

Chris Hatcher was born right slap in the middle of the twenty-second century. He was a product of third-generation Benjamin Spock’s theories of showering infants with love and encouraging their individualism instead of using any discipline. Chris Hatcher kept growing older, but couldn’t seem to grow up.

Hatcher leaves WMX

Some jobs you can leave gracefully. Some you cannot.

Some jobs end up involving personal relationships that suffer.

Some jobs furnish uniforms and some furnish personal transportation. Some jobs seem so temporary, people feel they must keep a change of clothes in a spare, land-based runabout parked behind the maintenance bay.

Hatcher’s current job did involve a huge sales and distribution process, initially land-based, as well. The company started on this planet, Earth, and close to the center of one of the most affluent and spread-out areas of it.

And in many lines of work, there are no long goodbyes. Much damage can be inflicted on a company by a grudge-holding terminated employee continuing to work there. Sometimes when an employee is only trying to be polite and turn in his two-week notice of leaving, the company realizes its vulnerability and makes the departure an immediate one.

So it is a rule of thumb to have some escape route- transportation and clothes whatever would be needed, planned in advance of giving notice.

This all lends to the hopelessness of trying to improve oneself by any means except those involving one’s own boss and the color of one’s nose. And Hatcher liked the original color of his. He was also slightly stubborn. No matter how arbitrary or how idiotic a decision, once he had made one, he was hard to deter.

Today he was depressed. His immediate assignment was to take the transporter that was being loaded and pilot it to several delivery areas in the grey zone between local runs and runs so distant that they had to involve time-base transpo.

This morning, Hatcher and his brightly colored Starbird would start a five-month delivery run. Still a long time, it was half a year by the new digital-based calendar that had to be pared down to 10 months to fit in the decimal system.

But still, it could be worse. This trip was only to seventeen planets in a couple of different galaxies. Now there are two things that are critical to that type of trip. The first would be the engines’ power plants to get you the heck out of wherever you were, to where you needed to go, and back to where you wanted to be. And second is the com-center — communications device. If for some reason you are not where you should be, or if you were running late or early, the com-center was a huge help. Of course, if you lost an engine, you would love your com-center. Everything has a duplicate backup.

To sleep, perchance to dream

When Hatcher slept, it was a fitful sleep of boredom. A sleep to pass the time. A sleep where there isn’t really anything else to do.

But sleep is better than not sleeping, and on some of these long, boring trips, he sometimes felt like screaming.

Screaming is good too, though. It does break up the boredom once in a while. The ion drive power plants were so quiet nowadays, they were only slightly more than a ringing in one’s ears. The oldies channel turned to anything past a “two” took care of that.

In older ships, you had to shout to the crew members to be heard. Now no screaming was necessary, and there also was no crew. Just an automated, passionless pile of pieces and parts, with one pilot.

So, truly, besides having an imaginary friend, sleep was the only entertainment after the pilot had logged in the assigned exercise time and activities on the all-in-one workout behemoth.

So call it a day, cycle the lighting to a simulated dusk, and pipe in some oldies music — maybe some deep album cuts that didn’t see the light of day much when the album was new, popular and shiny. When there were albums.

Hatcher said to himself, “that’s good,” and started to drift away with the prescription he had consumed an hour earlier.

Will it go ‘round in circles?

The trouble with the third-generation ion-drive engine was that in the vacuum of space there was nothing to push against, and nothing to pull through the engine. There was no acceleration in the traditional sense. In fact, there would be no acceleration at all, but rather a smoothly satisfying feeling and motion of maintaining the speed you were traveling already. A status-quo drive, as it was always called, was employed only after the initial thruster hogs shut down.

The third-generation ion drive power plant operated by diffusing ions ever so slightly off skew and off balance, as it were, so as to be capable of some slight acceleration by running the tiny things into each other.

The skew or deflection had to be controlled away from the ship upon their escape to control heat buildup. The twin engines were symmetrical and opposite in their deflection.

As Hatcher slept, ears and head full of some forgotten drum solo on the long album cut, he did not hear the alarm which told him his starboard engine had shut down for some reason, and his craft was motoring along pleasantly in a large circle.

A cry for help

Coordinates and positions in space are not based on latitude and longitude of course, since they are not on a planet, but rather they are triangulated. Space as we know it, or even can imagine it, is divided into sectors. Within each sector, any given position can be determined exactly by its relationship to three large and easily identifiable star masses. Thus any given point in space could be designated as “Sector Lamda, 120, 95, 357.” That allows terrestrial and on-board computers to lock in on a delivery destination and set the appropriate course and determine progress and time of arrival.

When hatcher woke up one of the first things to do is, of course, to see where he was. “Are we there yet?”

He was not there yet. In fact, he was not much of anywhere yet. He was pretty much exactly where he started. It was time to do an equipment check and a thorough assessment of the situation. What had happened to the ship? Could it be repaired?

Could it be repaired in the field? Could it be repaired in the field by a loser who really didn’t have much to show for his miserable existence of a life? These burning questions shot through Hatcher’s head.

At WMX company each employee had a file in the personnel division. In the file, a record was kept of how each employee behaved, how they performed their job at the company, and if they were in the transport division, how they maintained and cared for their vehicle especially if they had ever had to request mid-delivery repairs or rescue.

It never looked good on your record to have a breakdown, and somewhere in some policies and procedures manual, there is addressed a certain number, above which you are REALLY in trouble and on probation. Hatcher was dangerously close to discovering what that number was.

He examined everything he could, a second and third time hoping to discover something he might have overlooked — anything where he could repair his craft and continue his delivery, rather than having to call the dispatcher and ask for a tow.

The other shoe drops

He liked being alone. He liked being a loner. He thought about what his new profession might end up being. Alone- like an all-night disc jockey or like a grass cutter wearing soundproof headphones.

He wasn’t one given to the partying social lifestyle.

But there would be time for all that later. Right now the important thing is being able to get home. A real company man would think the important thing was making the delivery, but as much as Hatcher liked being alone, THIS WAS THE TIME TO GET BACK TO EARTH.

He knew he would pay in some ways for this bad luck but he decided to break down and call the dispatcher on the radio to ask for assistance. Now radios have changed a lot over the years from the warm comforting glow of tubes to the cold stare of transistors to the nonexistent INVISIBLE presence of AI. Whatever version of the radio device this was, he activated it and slowly spoke his ID flight number.

After about ten seconds without a response, he spoke to it again.

“This is Mark Hatcher, pilot of space flight # beta 3,” he spoke to the radio several more times only to no reply at all. Always quick to assess the situation, Hatcher decided that either his company had ceased to exist, the planet Earth had ceased to exist, or his radio communication device had ceased to exist.

Occam’s razor told him that the radio in his craft, being of the same approximate vintage as the power plants, was probably the culprit. The loss of a planet and the loss of his employer required too many extra steps to complete, and of the three named items, his space transporter was definitely the bigger piece of crap.

This radio was not even crackling or showing any signs whatever of trying to receive anything. Possibly it just wasn’t receiving, and the people back on Earth were trying to answer him, maybe even trying to think of something he could do fairly quickly to improve the situation. They were worried to death about Hatcher and they kept trying to respond to him but his radio received nothing.

Then his mind shivered as it moved to the alternative that perhaps his radio was not transmitting either and the people on Earth were totally unaware that there was a problem on CX41. They were talking amongst themselves, telling jokes, telling stories, telling lies, They were communicating and having a great time doing it- just not with Hatcher.

Of course, that was always the way it was. Even when Hatcher was forced into a situation where he had to attend a social event or party, no one really ever talked to him.

Friends are overrated.

Once when he was young he had friends. In school one weekend, he went on an adventure with a couple of his college buddies. One of them knew about caves and exploring them. It was a hobby with him — spelunking. They all hopped in a car and drove to a mountain about an hour out of town where the caver knew of a wet cave they could check out.

A wet cave is one that involves water to get into or through. Everything tells people NOT to go wet caving without appropriate tools and experience. It looked pretty scary in the beginning. But we were there, and the one guy had a little experience.

As it turned out, firstly, it was a very remote and unmarked location, and secondly, there was no dry way into the cave. So naturally, the place was not crawling with people. After the three had gone for about a half-hour into the cave, they stopped, sat back on a smooth rock, turned off their lanterns, and remained very silent for a few minutes.

This sensory deprivation resulted in some peculiar results. After a few minutes, Hatcher was sure he saw flashlights pointing in different directions and lanterns coming from the direction of the front of the cave where they had entered as though a second caving party was following fairly closely behind them.

Then almost immediately came their voices. They were chatting and laughing as they made their way toward him. Because of the echoes in the cave, Hatcher could not tell exactly what they were saying.

The friend who was the guide turned on his lantern. All of the other lights and voices disappeared. They were all phony, all supplied by our minds in a sensory deprivation situation. Yet they seemed so real at the time.

Hatcher thought back to that adventure. That is most likely what will happen to me up here. Down in the cave, even if it was a long way back to daylight, we knew we would get there. Up here, maybe not. Space is colder. And a lot darker.

A backup radio that works

On that particular little space hopper, there was no room for a spare engine, but there was room for a spare radio. Hatcher did not know why he hadn’t thought of that earlier.

It was a fairly simple emergency module that was mostly self-contained and stored away just under the first aid kit. It was the shape and size of what was used on earth decades ago as a container for cigars, a plant product to be lit and smoked into the lungs.

Coincidentally enough, the spare radio had one part that was not self-contained, a power cord with which it could be tethered to the ship’s systems through a receptacle that looked almost exactly like what the previous earth people used to light their plant products for smoking, history having come a sweet circle.

He plugged it in and turned it on as quickly as he could. Every ounce of his being was wishing, hoping, and praying for some signs of life from this device. He didn’t even care

If it was receiving the voice of someone saying how much trouble he was in now. Just someone saying something, he thought, PLEASE.

The radio crackled to life and the WMX dispatcher said “Hatcher, where have you been? Now that I see your coordinates, I see you are not far away. I am sending the closest transport to go to you and see if they can help you. Their three-man crews include an engineer and some diagnostic equipment. We’ll see if they can do a field repair to get you back here.”

Simple software patch and update to go straight with one engine

The engineer from WMX climbed into the smaller Space-Hopper and looked around. “Oldie but a goodie, huh?” That made Hatcher feel a bit aggravated.

“Yes- you have to be a darn good pilot to fly one of these. Those big-boys like the one you guys are on all but fly themselves. I don’t guess there is much challenge to running those. This is more like a fighter pilot’s job.”

“Well, this fighter seems to have taken one in the third hierarchy circuits of the outboard,” the engineer said, and he called back to Earth on his own personal radio. He told them he needed to re-skew the third hierarchy system of the left outboard, and the people at the other end of his line sent him a three-minute series of beeps and nonbeeps to the memory of his radio that he could use as a patch for the engine as a workaround for the problem.

When the transmission was complete, he plugged the phone into a different receptacle on one of the control boards. Ten minutes after that he pulled the plug and reran his diagnostic on the engine.

“Perfect,” said the engineer.

“Good as new?” asked Hatcher.

“Good enough for you fighter pilots, Cowboy” he laughed. “They want you to come back to the port. They will offload you and redispatch the freight and give your ship a thorough reboot.”

“Sure,” said Hatcher, with a bit of hesitation in his voice. He knew the time had come for a good chewing out and probably a LOT of free time to go look for his new job.

A company celebration

The trouble with getting fired is that you don’t get to get in the last word. You don’t get to explain that you were wanting to leave this worthless company anyway. You don’t get to be righteously indignant about your treatment. In the five years he had worked there, he had started to quit two dozen times. And now it’s too late.

In fact, it’s way too late. The people in the office acted as though they were genuinely glad to see him and had been worried about him. Instead of a pink slip, he received a yellow slip with the notice of a pay raise. There was also a note offering to have Hatcher start a training session that would ultimately lead to his flying on one of the big-boys for long hauls as a part of a three-man crew. Other humans.

While it was in the shop having some electronics rebooted, it had some replaced altogether and had a paint job. It really was now as good as new and so was Hatcher. If any other time or place someone had called him “Cowboy” it might make him mad.

Hatcher knew down deep that this time it was the sign of some level of respect and admiration on the part of the engineer stuck on the huge 3-man transport for months at a time. While Hatcher drove a more agile star-hopper with more time on Earth. Who knows? He may even use some of his Earth time to try making a friend or two.

But Hatcher knew he was a cowboy at heart. He just couldn’t leave that thrush-class ship even though it was lonely at times. He was able to keep his raise anyhow but did not become one of the elite pilots. He was elite in his own way. In fact, he reveled in his own solitary eliteness.

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