1. The Inner Controversy

It was true when the doctor said that life never turns out the way you think it will. This has become painfully apparent to Ransom Archer as he sits curled up behind a recycling bin. Life is that which is pouring through his consciousness like a trickle that suddenly and without warning turns into torrent. His memory is super-charged. It’s a common symptom of someone whose life has been put into jeopardy.
If someone had told Ransom a year ago that he would be in outer space hiding from terrorists today, then true to the cliché he would have called that person crazy. Yet here he is, trying to stop his hands from shaking, trying even harder to work up the nerve for his next move. He could hear the evildoers in the farthest dock yelling at each other. Hiding would not do. These were not like the careless security guards in the stories his friend, Ken, used to tell him, who would look for a few minutes and then give up. These men did not travel into the final frontier only to leave without what they came for. The leather bag Ransom clutched to his chest. Beatrice.
Small and fragile, frozen in time on the seventh day, Beatrice hid in a bag barely large enough to hold one of Ransom’s shoes. She is the hope of millions. She is worth easily billions. But to the terrorists, her worth is infinite. Ransom wasn’t sure if he himself also placed an infinite value on her. But of one thing he was sure, her life is worth a lot more than his. Beatrice could very well be the savior of the world.
Up above Ransom’s head was a recessed door to a shaft that was just big enough to crawl through. The shaft led to an airlock used for emergency maintenance access to the exterior of this particular module of the space city. If he could open the door, he could crawl through the shaft and into the airlock before the terrorists even found the shaft. He had a good feeling that the terrorists didn’t know their way around the station anywhere near as well as he did. If he disengaged the lock to the exterior door, then the safety lock on the interior door would be activated, sealing him inside the airlock. If the terrorists attempted to break the lock, then he should have time to put on a pressure suit, there should be one in there, and then he could go where they would dare not follow. Using a propulsion disk, he could take Beatrice and himself to an adjoining module where the terrorists did not have control.
Ransom reasoned to himself that he was no longer in danger.
He calmed down. He was still shaking, but not quite so violently this time. Ransom thought that if he were to go meet the theopathic terrorists and give them what they wanted, then they would leave. If he went out waving a white flag and bearing Beatrice, then surely, he thought, they would not harm him or anyone else. After all, these men were supposedly Christians. Either way, Ransom reasoned that his life was not in danger.
Yet Ransom was still paralyzed with fear.
This was not the same fear he felt when he entered the module. When he felt the explosion, when he saw the masked men and the guns pointed at him. When he realized that the impossible had happened, that terrorists had invaded the space city on Kilgore Station. The fear triggered a fight or flight response. Do or die. A burst of energy that made him temporarily indestructible.
This new fear was a dyke holding back a cold black sea of hopelessness. A gnawing caustic in his gut that threatened to kill him from the inside. It was like that feeling one gets when they walk out the front door in the morning knowing that they forgot something but not knowing what. Fear tied to something buried deep in his memory. Something he knew, but had forgotten. He felt paranoid. He felt that if he made the wrong decision, he would ruin everything. He feared for his life. Not for his physical body, but for his soul.
Ransom looked out the window across the room where he could see the blue-green sphere that contained all the joy and all the sorrow in existence. The product of billions of years of evolution. Although some say that the earth was created in just a week. But if that was true, then why did God stop on the seventh day when so much was left to do?
Maybe they’re right, he thought. Maybe the Rapture and the Wrath is right around the corner. So none of this really matters anyway.
No. Ransom must get to that airlock and do his duty. He must protect Beatrice.
But he couldn’t. Something was blocking his resolve. Something that he feared was holding him in his hiding place, telling him not to move. Was it the voice of God, speaking in a still small voice? He thought he didn’t believe in God anymore. Why did he contemplate giving the terrorists what they wanted? How could he possibly think about endangering something as important as Beatrice?
The evildoers stalked the corridors of the module. So crazy brave, and yet so cowardly that they wore masks to conceal their identity. Ransom’s life flashed before his eyes. Something in his memory was keeping him from action. A voice, a gesture, an idiosyncratic sign from a man in the past.
Then suddenly, it hit him. He opened his eyes. He was dizzy. His guts were turning and his head was spinning. And with a jarring epiphany, he knew.
One of the terrorists, one of the men behind the masks.
Ransom knew who he was.