Open and Shut: Part 1
Before there was '23kpc'...
About ‘Open and Shut’: I wrote this three-part science-fiction/mystery story about 10 years ago to kickstart my sleepy pursuit of writing fiction. The general setting and some of the characters later became the basis — with a completely different plot — for my novel-in-progress called ‘23kpc.’ I’ve been posting chapters of the latter here on Substack, and — for now— you can see all of that (including some early introductory material) in this section. You don’t need to read any of ‘23kpc’ to follow ‘Open and Shut,’ though; just understand that it came out of a writing exercise, and therefore has some plot holes and logical issues.
It’s Friday night. Not early in the evening but not late-late, either. 9:30 or 10 maybe. We’re in our stateroom, watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers — not the original, but the one from later in the twentieth century, with Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams — when the doorbell rings.
Of course Durwood, our Pooch, goes nuts and starts yelping, zooming around in mid-air the way it does, bumping from wall to wall, knocking books and knick-knacks off their upper shelves. At least this time it doesn’t get tangled up in the ceiling fan — good thing, too, since it’s the last ceiling fan on board until we land after the final two weeks of deceleration, and I doubt the Mataburthians even know what a ceiling fan is anyway, let alone how to make one. (It’s the kind of detail the natives tend not to understand, let alone develop, on a planet where the windspeed at ground level averages out to seventy-eighty knots.)
My wife Missy looks at me and I look at her and I can tell we’re both thinking the same thing: it’s Dodd again, from the cabin next door. Gotta be. Friday night, booze-ration ceiling lifted for the next twelve hours. You could set your calendar by Shawn Dodd’s binges.
Missy pauses the film. “I’ll take care of him,” I say. I go to the door and check the peepscope.
Surprise: it’s not Dodd but Yolanda Templeton, the twelfth-generation clone1 who occupies the cabin on the other side of Dodd’s. Her face fills the peepscope. The hell’s she doing here, I wonder. Our doorway’s been off-limits to her since the episode a couple of months ago, back in her gen-5 days, when I caught her and Missy in flagrante if you know what I mean. (Like the saying goes: Under the full moon.)
I say to Missy, “Not expecting Yolanda, are we?” Trying to keep the edge out of my voice. It’s a constant battle, even after thirty or forty dorm-cycles, but I’m working on it.
“No. I’m not, anyhow.” Not quite so much in control of her own voice, see. Apparently Yolanda’s gen-4 experience with me still touches a nerve. (What can I say?)
The doorbell rings again, and Durwood once again erupts. Missy fiddles with its remote to calm it down while I stand there trying to make up my mind about opening the door. Yolanda’s lives tend to be a little too interesting. They have a bad way of sticking to other people’s lives, if you know what I mean, and when you open your cabin door to Yolanda you’ve got to be prepared for more than just loaning her a cup of sugar.
“Mr. and Mrs. Williams?”2 Yolanda says, her voice thin and nervous through the reinforced plasticine. Ah. Not Guy and Missy but Mr. and Mrs. She doesn’t remember yet. She must’ve gen’d up the last time we were under.
“Yes?” I say, like we don’t recognize her voice, and wink back over my shoulder at Missy. “Who is it?”
“It’s Yolanda Templeton, from 1117A?”
“Oh, yes. Yolanda. You need something?”
“No, it’s not me. It’s — oh, it’s horrible. It’s Shawn. Mr. Dodd, you know? He—”
She stops and I check the scope again. She’s backed away from the door by now and just sort of stands in the hall, her arms folded across her chest as if in modesty. But it’s pretty hard to be modest, it strikes me, now that I can see she’s not wearing a stitch. She’s crying, and she’s naked. And something has happened. And she can’t talk. And she’s Yolanda. Jeezus. The worst of all possible worlds, which is saying something considering some of the places this starliner — the ISS Tascheter — will dock.
“Hang on,” I say to the door.
I explain the situation to Missy, who’s finally got The Pooch under control. It whirs contentedly in her arms. Some practical words go back and forth between us, and some impractical thoughts too if you know what I mean. We decide that before letting her in we’ll just send Durwood out into the hall, through its little exit door at floor level, dragging one of Missy’s old cotton bathrobes behind it. I explain this plan to Yolanda through the door while Missy goes to her closet and chooses something suitably plain and not so bulky and plush that it won’t fit through The Pooch’s swinging door.
“Here it comes,” I say through the door, and Missy gooses the remote, and Durwood wags and goes out the little exit, robe trailing behind.
A couple of moments later we hear Yolanda’s voice. “Okay,” she says, and giggles. “I’m decent.” I look through the peepscope one more time. She’s wearing the robe, all right, and the neckline and collar are closed, all right, and she’s holding Durwood in her arms and smiling down at it. It wriggles in pleasure.
Why hasn’t somebody just given her a Pooch of her own? I think — imagining, see, that it might preoccupy her enough to keep her out of trouble. Then I remember: oh right. She had one of her own back during during her gen 2, just a few years after takeoff. And then I remember what happened to it. Eww, I think, and shake my head to clear it, and open the door.
In comes Yolanda, and Missy holds out her hands to take The Pooch, and Yolanda hands it to her and then, of course, is when the robe falls open. Missy looks at me and I look at Missy and say, “Why don’t the two of you sit down and I’ll get us something to drink.”
I exit to the kitchen and come back with a tray of iceglasses and a pitcher of Margs. It’s what Missy and I have been drinking, and while I remember that Yolanda doesn’t care for them I also want her to be gone so we can get back to the movie — to real life in general, for that matter. It probably won’t happen soon. Yolanda is sitting in my own seat at the end of the sofa, by Missy’s chair. I perch with my fresh drink on the edge of the upholstered seat of the spare armchair, hoping to communicate impatience, hoping Yolanda will receive the message so transmitted. On the screen, Donald Sutherland snoozes in a lawnchair, his head frozen in place, lolling back, the whites of his eyes showing.
“So,” I say, “you said Shawn Dodd—”
Missy interrupts and nods her head. “Yes, Yolanda had just started to tell me, we were right, he’s been drinking—”
“Oh, but I have, too,” says Yolanda, and she giggles. “We were—”
“You were drinking together,” I say. “You and Dodd.”
“Yes, that too.” Another giggle.
I purse my lips, smile thinly, look at Missy (who is looking at me). “Okay, I think we get the picture. Did something happen, did he fall or pass out or get sick?”
“Oh nonono, nothing like that. He got sucked out.” She giggles again, and then the hard reality of what she just said hits her. A tear forms at the corner of one eye.
“What?”
“Yes. We were playing cards and I was losing so badly and I got up to go to the bathroom and when I got back the window was just closing and Shawn was gone. His chair and the card table and the cards and the scoretab and our drinks, too.”
The window.
I look over at Missy. She looks like I must have just then, her mouth forming an O, eyes wide. The cabin’s exterior windows can open, of course, but never — supposedly — unless the ship is berthed someplace with at least a near-Earth atmosphere. It’s not unheard of for a window to get blown open by a direct hit from a space rock or random debris, but it’s rare. And a blown window sure doesn’t slide closed afterwards. Which is why every room on the ship functions as its own airlock, automatically sealing against the vacuum of space whenever the doors close. Which is why Yolanda can be sitting on our sofa right now, instead of naked and dead at a card table out in interstellar space: the bathroom had saved her life.
“I — Jesus, Yolanda. Did you hear anything while you were in the bathroom? A bang or anything?” My head’s stuck on logic, see, stupid stupid logic: something must’ve hit the window, it couldn’t possibly open and close...
She shakes her head.
Missy chimes in with a better question: “Did you check around Shawn’s cabin? He wasn’t playing a trick on you was he, hiding in a closet or something—”
Yolanda dead-eyes Missy and for a second I think she’s about to break down crying again. But she surprises me. “You must think I’m awfully stupid, Mrs. Williams.” She swallows half her Marg, apparently in a single gulp. “Of course I checked his cabin. His closets, the kitchen and pantry, even peeked out into the hall for a second in case he was out there. Shawn was gone.”
She giggles, at the rhyme probably, and a little bit of the tension in the room dispels. Durwood yelps once, and Yolanda scoops it up. She puts her face down close to the fur-fringed ocular unit on the front end, scrunches her expression up, and mews at it: “Won’t let bad old outer space get little Poochy though, no, we, won’t!” The Pooch’s tail wags.
Yolanda hasn’t reported the incident to anyone else, as it happens. Without thinking, suddenly freaked out — probably by the narrowness of her escape more than about Shawn Dodd — she’s run straight to our door to talk to us.
We’re considered the adults in this wing, I suppose, at least on this deck. I guess Dodd might have fit into that category; he at least dressed the part, except during the off-ration periods when he stayed locked in his room. But of course in Dodd’s apparently quite sudden absence, well, we’re it. In the other direction down the hall are only more clones, mostly gen-2 through -7, and there are no staterooms on the far side of the hallway — only flat walls, interrupted here and there by doorways, utility panels, recessed fire-control equipment, and a scattering of large paintings and space-artsy photographs: artists’ renderings of alien landscapes, color-enhanced nebulae and such. Crew on the deck above. Storage, plumbing, bots and other infrastructure on the floors below.
But good old level-headed Guy and Missy Williams, loving married couple, experienced spacecruisers, passports stamped with so many dorm-cycles, on-planet and off-, that they’ve had to be swapped up nine times already: we’re who the youngsters in crisis come to.
It probably doesn’t hurt that they all think we’re what used to be called private eyes. Detectives. Dashing and sophisticated, booze-swilling gumshoes. When actually, we just tend to be swilling booze in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Well, except of course for that one right time — the asteroid mine which Missy’s disheveled and probably corrupt Uncle Peejee had convinced us to invest in, over my fierce — and luckily incorrect — objections. Without that, we’d probably have never gone spacecruising to begin with. We never had much luck attracting cash before, and hadn’t needed any luck afterwards.)
So anyway, tonight, Missy finally calms Yolanda down and takes her back to her own cabin. The movie’s probably going to remain unwatched. I proceed through my usual nighttime routine — fighting the urge to check my watch or even count the mental beats while Missy’s gone: I clean up the kitchen, melt down the empty and half-empty iceglasses, plug The Pooch in for the night.
Not surprisingly, I suppose, I also check the seals in our own windows. All seems secure. Just to be safe, I close the shields over them, and check what I can of the opening-and-closing electronics. All still seems secure. I leave the shields in place for now. We’re not scheduled to pass by any other star systems any time soon, not this close to the Mataburthian one, so it’s not a matter of keeping sunlight out. It’s just... just in case.
Missy comes in, finally. And I finally steal a glance at the time. Missy’s been gone close to an hour.
I say only, “She okay?”
“Yes,” says Missy. “She wanted to gen up again — I think she wanted to forget the whole thing ever happened — but I talked her into hanging around. I told her we might need her to help the investigation.” She laughs. “Material witness, all that. Then I gave her a tranq button and put her to bed. She’ll sleep.”
I can’t help noticing that Missy’s got her robe — the one she loaned to Yolanda — draped over a forearm. I sigh, mentally shake my head at myself. I go to my wife then and lead her, as tenderly as ever I can, to our own bedroom.
Missy sleeps in the next morning and I let her. I head to breakfast in the vast common dining room. A few guys see me and sort of wave me over in their direction — they’ve got a game of Four-Way laid out on the table, and the board is surrounded by champagne flutes both empty and well on their way there — but I’m not interested in cards and booze right now. (Especially not with Yolanda’s story still in my ears.) I wave back at them like I don’t understand, and instead make a beeline for the table by one of the aft windows where Matty’s sitting by himself, reading the ship’s paper.
Matthew “Matty” Torricelli serves the cruise line as a purser. This is probably the second or third time we’ve sailed with him. Like us, and most of our generation — indeed, like nearly all of the cruise ships’ crews — Matty has never taken the clone option. Instead, he rotates with the three other pursers on board, dorm-cycling for days or weeks at a time. When he and we come out of it, we do so on the same schedule. We’ve never met the other cycles’ pursers, housekeepers, bartenders, the rest of the crew, or passengers. We probably never will, except possibly coming and going on-planet: our cycles don’t match up. Of course the presence of the more or less ever-young clones can throw us; each dorm-cycle ages us by just a night, no matter how many weeks or months we’re actually conked out. So after we wake up we’re technically always older by a few hours. The clones, meanwhile, have possibly re-gen’d one or more times; they keep resetting their clocks. Time’s arrow goes forward for them, as it does for us, but then backs up and restarts again.
You’ll go nuts if you think too hard about it. Most of us choose to deal with it as simply as possible — we don’t think about it.
I sit across the table from Matty, and flag down a passing waiter to bring me a pot of coffee. Matty looks up at me.
“Guy,” he says, and nods. He looks back down at the paper. I’m not fooled. I know he can feel my eyes boring in through the top of his head. But he goes through the motions anyway, pressing the screen to turn the pages, running his finger down the margins as he reads like some people do. My coffee arrives. Finally Matty sighs and hits the Fold button. The paper clacks shut this way and that, collapsing down to a pocket-sized pad of smart-fiber optics. He puts the paper in an inside pocket and at last looks up at me.
“So,” he says. “What is it this time?”
See, that’s the thing about Matty. He’s been doing this so long, and knows Missy and me well enough, that he never needs advance warning when one of us just sits down or strolls in his direction with the wrong sort of greeting in our eyes. Whatever he’s about to hear, he assumes it’s a story he’ll (a) laugh at, at least eventually, or (b) regret hearing for the rest of this cycle and maybe even the later ones.
He may not need any advance warning but I guess I need the element of suspense for my own psychopathological purposes. I gesture with my chin in what I mean to be the direction of his jacket pocket, towards his collapsed ship’s paper. “Anything interesting going on? Like last night, maybe?”
“You mean interesting like Yolanda-Templeton interesting?” He laughs. “Camera in the hallway caught her running out of Shawn Dodd’s cabin and straight to your door. Security guys will probably want to save that clip for their greatest-hits collection. It wasn’t anywhere near that interesting a little later when she came back out with Missy, of course. At least not to people who don’t know the back story—”
I grimace. “All right, all right. Water under the bridge, Matty. No, I wasn’t thinking of Yolanda. Put it this way: any alarms go off in the night?”
“Alarms?”
“Yeah. Like emergency-type alarms. Any horns go off, bells ring, instrument-panel lights flashing red? Anything?”
Now he’s interested, professionally interested. Don’t mess with Matty’s ship, at least when he’s on-cycle. “No alarms that I heard of, no. Should there have been?”
Again I don’t answer directly. Or, okay, at all. “Tell me something, Mr. Ship’s Purser. Can our windows open?”
“Windows?” I’ve deliberately left it ambiguous and it’s had the desired effect. Matty’s confused. For all of about a millisecond. “Shit, Guy. You better not be saying what I think you’re saying. What time was this?”
“Maybe ten o’clock. Little earlier maybe. But you didn’t answer my question. Is it even possible at all? Open and shut, without triggering any alarms? Out here, light years from anything?”
Have to give him credit. He doesn’t say flat-out No. Instead, he thinks about it, and you can see him running through the permutations and weird conditions and counter-conditions which hold during interstellar travel at the near light-speed a starliner can build up to. I’d done the same thing myself, although of course Matty knows a heck of a lot more than I do about the ship’s systems, to say nothing of the physics involved.
“I won’t say No,” he says at last. “I will say Nooooooo, though.” He draws the syllable out, elides it into uncertainty. “It doesn’t make sense. I mean, maybe the circuitry misfires. Maybe the environmental sensors fail at the same time, so she” — the ship — “so she doesn’t know she’s breached. But, well...
“Look,” he says after pausing a bit. “I’ve never had to deal with a meteor strike, okay? But I’ve seen the training films.”
Now I’m interested myself. Of course when you decide to spend your extended life cruising among stars, you know all kinds of disasters might happen. It’s like the dorm-cyclers vs. clones thing: you learn pretty quickly not to think about any of it. It’s out of your control. You’ll just make yourself crazy. So it’s never even occurred to me: of course they must train the crews to deal with as much as possible, at least to know about it.
“Training films?”
“Uh-huh. There’s one that nobody ever forgets. It’s a long clip, maybe ten minutes in real time but they always slow it way down for dramatic effect. It was taken by a camera mounted on the hull of a Class-1” — first-generation — “liner. Meteor comes in from out of the right-hand frame, slams into the hull right where there’s a window. Big flash of light, broken bits of hull wall and starglass blowing out into the vacuum of course. Roomburst, they call it. But then comes the contents...”
It hasn’t registered with me and I say so.
“Yeah. The contents. I mean think about it, Guy. Every cubic centimeter inside of a liner’s hull holds something. Wire, pipes, fuel... books... paper... toiletries, napkins, bedclothes, beds and chairs, TV sets, phones and pads and—” He stops.
Now I’ve got the picture. And I know, of course, why he’s stopped. What the film shows. I swallow, pause.
And then I say, “Okay. Maybe now’s a good time to mention Shawn Dodd...”
Things are already, well, interesting. So Shawn Dodd has left the building, such as it is… And yet Yolanda Templeton, obviously, has not. Head to Part 2 for the next installment!
“Clones” are generally known as “reboots” in 23kpc. I thought the former term was a little too scientific and, uh, un-cool, and recast it for the novel.
Yeah: “Williams,” not yet (as in 23kpc) “Landis.”