Download the Book - Islam and Science Fiction

mentally, while others I hadn't really given thought to.
I heard Chuck's headset before he glided into the exercise
chamber. His head bobbed to whatever grinding cacophony he
pumped into his brain at full volume. Even past the high quality of
his earphones I heard tinny throbbing sounds pounding across the
small room.
He nodded at me, keeping time with the beat of his music.
"Susan," he said, by way of greeting. He drifted past me to the bench
I'd just left and began strapping himself into the machine.
I wanted to say something about the hundredth day. I want to
say: Hey, Chuck, maybe we should have a party, celebrate the
halfway-halfway-there mark?
But he was breathing in time to the movements of the exercise
machine, his head still bobbing slightly to the enraged-sounding lyrics
tinnily wafting from his earphones. I watched the muscles of his neck
for a moment: tense, then relax, tense, then relax.
I gripped the rim of the open doorway and pushed myself into the
hall, expertly gliding all the way back to my personal quarters without
having to touch the walls more than twice.
I needed to look at my calendar.
* * *
I refreshed myself as best I could with our shipboard
facilities. What passed out here for showers and cleanliness was
nothing of which my mother would ever have approved. Hardships to
her would not have included going without a real bath for over a year:
that would simply have been inconceivable.
But we had an excellent moisture reclamation system. The
latest technological advances, and more luxurious facilities than any
crew before us. I, of course, was the main experiment of this
particular voyage: the first woman, the addition to the physical and
psychological makeup of a manned voyage to the only other true
planet Earth has ever sent her emissaries to touch down upon. I was
the wildcard.
It wasn't me they wanted data on, of course. It was really the
crew with me. Or perhaps it was all of us. In space, in our truncated
warren-like corridors and small chambers and tinted glass stronger
than steel, it was easy to feel gerbil-like. Rat-like, if one were to give
proper credit to the more intelligent of maze-navigators and puzzlesolvers,
rodentarily speaking. What do rats do when presented with
A? How do they solve the problem of B? I could insert variables:
cramped spaces, limited company, boredom, a female.
But no; none of that is quite fair. Every one of us aboard had
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