Speculative 15th Chapter

Ragle hurried towards the spaceship and greeted Walter, shaking him by the hand.

“How did you—” Ragle exclaimed, his voice trailing off as he gazed inside the spaceship.

“Do all of this?” asked Walter, also turning to survey the inside: the white spacious interior with lacquer finish and silver lining; the multitudinous cabinets with labels ranging from wiring and radios to oxygen and breakfast cereals; the huge, centered, transparent structure that housed the ship’s three puffy, cream-colored space suits, all covered with various panels and snakelike tubes. “1998’s a lot different from 1959, Ragle. A lot different.”

Walter then turned and crossed the threshold of the spaceship, and Ragle followed closely behind him. Both men passed through the central hub and entered the cockpit, where Mrs. Keitelbein was busy preparing the rocket for takeoff.

“Hello, Ragle. Please take the seat on the right. Walter will strap you to your chair.”

Ragle nodded. He circumvented the middle chair (presumably Walter’s) to get to his own.

“Don’t worry, Ragle,” Mrs. Keitelbein resumed, as Walter began stretching multiple cords over and across Ragle’s torso, securing them into place. “Both Walter and I are experienced pilots. We’ve piloted several flights before. In fact, we only asked you to join us in the cockpit so that you could get a wonderful view of the moon, at the very least.”

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Almost no time had passed before the spaceship was prepared for takeoff. Ragle felt the thrusters burning, the floor rumbling. This is it, he thought. I’ll be leaving Earth again. And this time not Venus but the moon. I’ll be free again from gravity, free from the restrictive force that’s kept me tied down to the Earth.

The ship was now shaking violently and, within seconds, it lifted. The force of the takeoff arrested Ragle, fixing him tightly to his seat. He struggled to swivel his head and, with limited vision, managed to observe the Keitelbeins. He heard Walter tapping buttons and flipping switches; he saw Mrs. Keitelbein inspecting a few of the many LCD monitors, some which were synced to various cameras both inside and outside the ship.

Repositioning his head, Ragle noticed that the cloudy, muddled sky had now transformed into the silent black of space, but a blackness gleaming with golden stars. The universe, Ragle thought. The vast, vast universe. With stars counted in the billions…galaxies unexplored…teeming with new energies, new possibilities—new life.

Amazing, Ragle thought. Too much for words…

Filled with these thoughts, Ragle looked beyond the windshield and noticed that several stars, including Sirius, were now blinking—blinking rapidly, in fact. That’s odd, Ragle wondered…why are those stars blinking?

“Do you see that?” Ragle asked aloud.

But there was no response. Even the sounds from the tapping of buttons and the flicking of switches had ceased to resonate throughout the cockpit.

Turning with what little movements he could make, Ragle checked to see if either Walter or Mrs. Keitelbein had witnessed this strange occurrence with the stars. But where the two pilots should have been, Ragle found instead a slip of paper floating in front of him, adorned with another word:


THE KEITELBEINS


Not again, Ragle thought. How could it happen here? How could it get the Keitelbeins?

He nervously returned his gaze to the spectacle beyond the windshield: the rapidly blinking stars were also expanding at this point—and, he realized, proliferating. More stars had materialized--all blinking, all expanding. The vacuum of space in front of him was no longer the giant black monolith it once was but rather an ecstatic and dazzling (albeit unexplainable) phenomenon. Even the chairs that the Keitelbeins had once occupied (if they even had at all) had dissolved into mere slips of paper. The windshield, the walls—everything that wasn’t yet paper was being reduced to it.

But all at no cost to Ragle. Somehow, he was still breathing.

In almost no time, the entire cockpit had been reduced to paper. But this time, something else happened: each slip of paper began to move. In the same direction, even: towards the stars.

Picking up velocity and torque, each word whipped past Ragle, heading towards some central point. Suddenly, he wondered, why am I not paper?

But before he could complete this thought, Ragle witnessed what was surely a brilliant spectacle: all of the words convulsed and crashed together, producing a radiant explosion that blinded him. And when he looked up, he found a single raggedy piece of paper, floating on a black, starless background, complete with one word, the consummation of all the others:


LOGOS


The final slip, the LOGOS, pulsed and beat with life. Like a heart, Ragle thought.

And it moved towards Ragle.

And it got close.

So close that he could reach out and touch it.