Keep the Crew Happy

Dearest Rachel –

Another morning, another weird dream, this time about the lessons of space travel. This one’s a fairly simple one, though, both in term of what it says and what it means, and you can see it in the title above: keep the crew happy. The devil, however, is in the details.

To be honest, I couldn’t tell you what role I was playing aboard this ship. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the captain or anything that important, but I don’t think I was necessarily one of the more low-level scrubs. Maybe I was in charge of payroll, which would be in keeping with my real-life occupation, but there was precious little activity on my part toward that end that I witnessed or participated in; I wasn’t exactly handing out credit bars or anything like that to the crew, or whatever might amount to ‘pay’ in the cosmic future.

Most of what I could tell you about what was going on involved my running about, finding out what was going on in one place or another on the ship, filling in where necessary, and otherwise taking care of what might, on an earthly vessel, be considered minor issues. Basically, it was something between a courier and a morale officer, as far as I can tell. And yes, I know you’d joke that I’d be one of the last ones who should be given that latter job; you weren’t available, honey. In any event, there was generally no time for any of us to not be doing something to keep the ship running and going safely where it was supposed to go. I don’t know if that meant there were no ‘passengers,’ per se, but for the moment, everyone was a crew member, and everyone had to be busy.

At some point, however, I found myself resting in some lounge or another, looking out through the architectural anomaly that was a bay window. Why a spaceship would have such a protruding bubble of a window struck me as odd, even within the dream; current crafts have few windows in the first place, and those that exist are relatively small and heavily fortified. Then again, assuming I was in some sort of a relaxation chamber, what else is there to do but literally stare off into the vastness of interplanetary (interstellar?) space? At least a window like this would be one to facilitate that, I suppose.

Or not; at some point, I could see another such craft in the distance. At least, I think that’s what it was, as while it didn’t much look like a terrestrial ship, it didn’t resemble any spacecraft I’ve ever seen before, either. Unfortunately, I don’t think I could describe what, exactly, it looked like to you, as that’s one part of the dream that seems to have already faded from memory. So even as it didn’t much look like what I might think of when I think of the word ‘spaceship,’ it was sufficiently nondescript in its own way that it didn’t call attention to what it did look like.

All I could tell you is that it was growing increasingly larger as I watched it approach, and fairly quickly, too. Which makes sense; speeds out in the vastness of outer space have to be phenomenal, in order to traverse from one point to another in the span of even a lifetime. The distances between even our nearest stellar neighbors are measured in light years, after all; if we’re headed even to the likes of Proxima Centauri, it will take both a crazy amount of time and speed to get there. So the fact that this other vessel was moving fast wasn’t so surprising as much as it was heading straight for us; specifically, at the window itself. I just said how space is impossibly vast and empty; what was going on such that this craft was basically aiming at us (because a collision out here would be so improbable as to have to be deliberate)?

At the last minute it appeared to veer away and go ‘over’ us (hard to speak in terms of ‘up’ and ‘down’ in zero gravity, but think in terms of my own position, I guess), but not before banging into the window, resulting in a large crack in it. It wasn’t enough to actually cause the vacuum of space to rush in and suck us out, like a small-scale black hole, but it was more than enough to frighten all of us aboard, especially myself and the others in the relaxation chamber at the time who witnessed the accident (if that’s what it was).

And this is where we have the problem of keeping people happy; how am I going to do that, as the morale officer, when I’ve been scared just as witless by this close call as anyone? You can make sure that everyone is properly fed and entertained – yes, bread and circuses work just as well in space as anywhere else, since we’re all still human, no matter where we are. But if we aren’t in a position to feel safe where we are – and in space, there’s nowhere to escape to if you’re threatened by something – there is no place for happiness. Safety first; then we can work on things to content ourselves with.

Anyway, this is pretty much where I managed to surface from my dream, so there’s no resolution as to what happened – who buzzed us and why, and whether we pursued him for answers or retribution. I never had to do anything more for the rest of the crew to reassure them about the situation – which was just as well, since I couldn’t do much apart from waking up and sparing myself. It doesn’t help the rest of them, but as they only existed in my head, that probably doesn’t matter.

In any event, now I need to get on with real life, and trying to keep the crew in my head from mutiny going forward. To that end, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck, as I’m probably going to need it.