I woke up to the sound of bells.

That in itself was a nice change. Stranded somewhere in the middle of the Izzy desert, in some super-secret ISF spaceship repair base, where the wake-up call sounds at 5:30 in the morning and the lights go off at 2330 hours, you should be grateful for any event in which you wake up by yourself, without being shaken awake by anyone. And since waking up usually characterize your day, this was a good sign. I still had a few minutes until they'll come to officially wake me up. And since it was clear that the distant, tingling bells were only a fragment of my still-sleepy imagination, I allowed myself the luxury of lying still, delving in the memories the bells brought.



It's been years since I even thought of Dimion.

Wake-up call did happen, eventually. The nearly-silent, glass-still pre-sunrise room, where there always seems to be a kind of mist hanging, was almost instantly transformed into the usual round-the-clock screaming, squealing mass of stupidity. Just another day in hell. I was quite over last month's depression by now; but then, I couldn't have possibly sank any lower. The other reason for my improved mood was that we were now on our way back to space - just a week away; and I was studying for my Night Duty Officer test.

That doesn't mean life was fun. But I did my share of ranting for this year in the previous page.

      The case of the missing stars



"What are you dreaming about?" Caterpillar asked, waving an arm in front of my face.

"Eh, nothing, really. Where were we?"

"How do you find yourself in this thing?"

I looked down again at the radar. It was installed and functioning again, after months of dust-gathering in some basement. They put it on the Relax, to be ready for the big come-back to space. It was making problems, of course, but then, it always did. Learning to use the radar - more complicated than it sounds - was one of the duties we had to pass for the Night Duty test, but I already knew that - I was spending more time near that damn radar than near my own Alfred, actually. Lucky me. But that, of course, also meant I had to explain about it to all the other would-be-NDO's. More complicated than it sounds.

"Okay." I switched the radar to Leaf mode. "We now have a flat image. We're in the middle. Right here. Clear so far?" The whole conversation was spoken in very loud tones, trying to raise over the sawing noises from the Front Crew's Cabins, where someone was fixing something or another.

Caterpillar nodded. In spite of his extreme body measures, he was actually one of the brighter shipmates.

"Now with that lever you raise it or lower it, like, around the ship. see?" Actually there was nothing much to see, except some green dots appearing and disappearing from the screen.

"Then why do we only see half the screen all the time?" Cater asked.

"Because we're on earth, dummy" I said. "We don't have a full panorama look in all directions."
 



"Okay. let's say I got that... Now how do you find anything that's not in your flat level?"

"You switch to Punch mode" I said, and hit the Leaf/Punch switch again. "Now you can see the whole picture, in layers, like."

"But I can't make anything of it."

"It's not as complicated as it looks. Here." I Leaf/Punched again. "Let's lower this a bit... here, see these two stars here?"

"What are they?" Caterpillar asked.
 














"Some satellites or something. Now if we raise our angle a bit, we won't see them anymore -" I did, and the spots disappeared - "But when we put it in punch, we, what's that?"

"What's what?"

"Did you hear that?"

"What?"

"Sounded like bells."

"If you can hear something behind these electric saws, you must have better ears than I do. Well now what?"

I shrugged and went back to work. "Well, you now pass to Punch mode, so you will see them again, but a little lower, cause we're on a higher angle." I pushed Leaf/Punch, but the stars weren't there.





"Where?" Caterpillar asked.

I looked at the screen closely. "Is this thing malfunctioning again?"

"Looks fine to me" Cater said. "Are you sure you still remember how to work it? After all, it's been a while."

"No way! It's just like riding a bicycle" I said, then tried to reason, "It goes round and round and round and in the end your butt aches."

Caterpillar laughed, as he always does. I love this guy. "Well it does'nt work now. Better be careful next time you get on your bike. Let's go tell the technicians and find something else to study."
 

      Strange days







There was no denying it: strange things were happening. In the following two days, I've had my uniform ranks' safety pins mysteriously disappear, only to be found half an hour later tucked inside my shoes, my identity disk mysteriously replaced by a golden heart necklace while I was away making a phone call, me saying "what?" loudly in the middle of a crew briefing with the commander-in-chief - I could have sworn I heard someone calling my name - which got me some strange looks, but with me being me, no special note was taken, and to top it all, ravenous Pac-Men invading Pussy, the ship's main computer, and causing that poor computer technician, who only wanted to finish his job and be home for dinner, to bang his head against the wall. Quite forcefully, as a matter of fact.

I was getting suspicious.