Tangle in the Dark - Kassidor

stream to him by pocket eye. His sentence was so exact thathe would have to make sure his pocket eye was charged.It was years ago that Ava played in his universe a lot,helping him design a communications device that fit withinthe laws of three-d reality on his planet. She and Alan hadn'tbeen lovers then, Thom often played with her, in thepersonification of a crewman from the Presidente Lula. Theyhad come up with something that was as useful as a phone,but could only be recharged by sunlight and had an eyepiecefor a screen. Even so, it had been a fad in that part of hisworld for a decade or two. It was stuck in three-d realityhowever and he could not pull it thru to his duty station tocheck its charge.He didn't have to worry about that. He got called to thecaptain's office not long after he got back from lunch. He waspretty sure that couldn't be good, Captain M'Kintre had nevercompletely forgiven Alan for his desertion, much less fakingthe data from the whole expedition. They had spoken only adozen times in the century plus since his desertion, and whilethey had been civil, Alan wouldn't call them cordial.Today the starfield was not rotated and the gravity wasone percent, as the drive would make it. The snowflakes werecoming up out of the floor, the floor was invisible as it almostalways was in the Captain's universe. There was no visiblefurniture here today, just the depths of space fifteen billionmiles from Sol.There was an acolyte from Theology there to greet him.99