The ship's lights were dimmed with simulated night. They were supposedly on course and everyone had settled into a routine. Following the moon was their all-encompassing task now. They were all on edge, and the jumps were uncomfortable, but things had calmed into a kind of routine. Their encounter with the dark storm had been the only break in routine. Melissa's experience kept her humming and waiting for the next jump to be the one that would take her to Alan. At least in front of the others. Diana had been more cruelly skeptical about Melissa's story, but would occasionally murmur something about time and four years and would delve into her calculations again.

Tony was managing to catch a few hours sleep out of every twenty-four, and he wouldn't allow the jump drive to be used more than once a day. The ship could stand it, but he wasn't sure the crew could. Diana did insist that she learned more with every jump they made. He always felt that three hours of sleep was a successful night, at least since Ultra. He stayed in his bunk for a more acceptable six hours to keep the others from worrying, but didn't force his body to sleep long enough to let the nightmares come again.

He answered a call of nature this evening and heard something that sounded like crying from Melissa's bunk as he passed. Mel had incredible mettle. Diana was tin-plated and had enough duties to keep her mind off their problems. Melissa simply watched and waited and helped wherever she could. She also took Diana's abuse with more spunk than anyone he'd ever seen.

He tapped lightly on the screen to Melissa's bunk and the noise stopped. She opened a crack in the panel, then opened it further when she recognized him. She pulled blonde hair from her face and scooted over to make room for him to sit next to her. He hesitated only momentarily then sat. The bunks were the only personal space anyone had on the ship. They were about the size of a train sleeper berth. The bed could be adjusted to lie flat or form a contour chair. There was a video screen embedded on a track in the ceiling and small speakers and earphone jacks to listen to music. There was also a small cabinet with a computer keyboard to access the computer or entertainment complex. The bed was narrow, smaller than a single bed, but Tony was well aware that two people would fit in the small intimate space if they were very friendly. He tried not to remember that.

Melissa motioned for him to pull his feet in and she shut the panel once he complied.

"Are you all right?" He asked her softly once the panel closed.

She nervously pulled her hair back again. She was dressed in some kind of tiny-- and definitely nonregulation-- pajamas. They were pale pink cotton with tiny roses and clung tightly to breasts and hips. The top and bottom didn't come close to meeting and provided an appealing view of tanned stomach and navel. "I'm fine." Her voice was cheery, but her nose and eyes were puffy.

He reached over and touched the reddened nose and gave a shake of his head. "Liar."

"Fine as I can be, okay?" She pressed against him in the tight space. He lay back on her pillow and took her in his arms. It was one of the few ways to be even moderately comfortable in the small space. She appeared to understand, tucking herself close to him on her side.

"We are getting closer, Melissa. Don't give up."

"I'm not, really. It's just... those jumps..." She shivered and closed her eyes tightly.

He patted her shoulder. "They're bad. I know."

Tears began to fall. "What if we don't find them? What if we never find them? We've been out here for months now--"

"Melissa, this ship is supplied for a crew of six for a year. We have plenty of food, air and fuel. We have to see this through. Diana is learning more and more about the system with every jump we make." He stroked her gently as he spoke and turned to face her. Her lips were close to his and he found himself leaning over and kissing her. Melissa cooperated fully and it was obvious to him that she would go farther should he wish it. It had been a long time since he had touched a woman like this. He enjoyed the feel of her smooth skin and her scent. He pulled back reluctantly.

She opened her eyes and looked puzzled.

"This is... very nice. But I do not believe you should give up on finding Alan Carter just yet."

She sighed. "Tony, I'm not a particularly patient woman."

"I should leave."

"Don't, please. I'll behave. Besides, won't it twist Diana's shorts if she thinks you're in here with me?" Melissa relaxed against him.

He chuckled at the idiom which he understood, even though he'd never heard it before. "Yes, I suppose it would." Melissa's breathing became slower and more even. She was sound asleep and curled against him comfortably. He relaxed and watched her sleep. Alan Carter was a lucky man, but he would certainly have his hands full dealing with this one.

When Melissa opened her eyes the morning after the next horrible jump everything felt so wonderfully right. She turned over and watched as Alan opened his eyes. He leaned toward her and gave her a long slow kiss, moving his hand down her body just the way she liked. She moved against him, wanting him. For a moment she was puzzled. "How did you get here?"

"I flew out to meet you. Don't you remember?"

As he said it she knew it was true. He had come aboard the Eagle and taken her to bed. They'd be on Alpha by the end of the day and everything was just fine.

"We need to get ready to land," he murmured into her ear.

"Love me again first," she insisted. She knew he was likely to turn her down. She knew how he was when duty called. She moved her tongue around the inside of his ear. He hesitated and she grinned. "We could go take a shower together," she suggested.

"Yes, let's," he agreed hesitantly. That surprised her. Alan was seldom hesitant about anything. He was a very black and white sort of guy.

"Go turn the water on, and I'll give you a treat," she suggested with a laugh.

He rolled obediently out of bed. She thought it a bit odd. Alan should have teased her, or told her they needed to work first. He hesitated again. She laughed. "Go on, I'll be right there." He moved out of the bed.

She got her robe and stood. The ship was quiet, but of course no one would be up and working on jump calculations this morning. They would be at Alpha soon. She glanced toward the airlock and saw the Eagle beyond it. She turned and noticed she didn't hear water running yet. She opened the storage compartment under the bed and reached in her suitcase for the perfume she knew made Alan crazy. She sprayed her neck and arms, smiling with anticipation. She breathed in the scent that Alan had been calling "pure sex", relaxing completely. The last thing she had sent him before the accident was a pair of her lacy panties, sprayed liberally with the perfume and a note telling him to come up with a creative way to get her to the moon. At last she was almost there.

She opened her eyes and beheld the stuff of nightmares. It was taller than she was and seemed to ooze slime. It appeared to be an unfinished creature, no skin or fur over exposed soft tissue, which hung in rope-like tentacles and knots of fat. One gigantic eye dripped ochre slime.

She drew in a sharp breath but did not scream. The faint-hearted did not roam the streets of Katmandu alone, or climb the heights of Machu Piccu or play strip poker with known drug dealers. She had done all those things. She wanted a weapon and all she had in hand was a bottle of perfume. Without hesitation she brought up her hand and sprayed the perfume right in the creature's eye.

"Tony!" she cried out. "Tony! There's some kind of monster on the ship!"

She got no response from Tony, but the creature in front of her shuddered as the spray hit it. She sprayed it again, and it didn't try to resist, but it seemed to... degrade. The entire creature was disgusting, looking as if it were constantly on the verge of decomposing, but the spots where she had sprayed were showing odd signs of shrinking, dissolving. She sprayed it again-- right in the eye and watched it shudder.

Tony hadn't answered her call. For a moment she started to call Alan but she suddenly knew he wasn't there and could not have been there. Her heart ached desperately, but she had no time for it. She reached over and pounded on the panel to Diana's bunk. When she received no response she opened the screen. Diana lay on the bed, eyes open and unseeing, body twitching slightly. Melissa shuddered. Was that what she looked like when she had thought-- had believed-- Alan was with her?

She felt a burst of anger and turned from the slimy, but oddly inactive creature to Diana and sprayed the perfume in her face.

Diana breathed deeply, choked and sat up abruptly calling out, "John!" She blinked, looked around and screamed as she saw the disgusting creature behind Melissa. Seeing that Diana would be little help Melissa turned and made her way past the jelly monster toward the command deck.

When she opened the door she found another of the creatures there. It shuffled slowly, trying to turn its one gigantic eye toward her. Melissa still hadn't thought to get another weapon and she sprayed this creature as well. Tony sat at the controls, hands moving over the console. Melissa frowned. From what she had seen of Eagle control panels, Tony appeared to be accelerating the ship with a fuel consumption that would soon overload the engines. She shouted at Tony again, then sprayed perfume at him. Tony coughed and looked perplexed. "What?-"

"Tony!" Melissa couldn't help shouting. "There's some kind of freaky aliens aboard. They're making you hallucinate!"

Tony took a good look at the controls in front of him and began shutting down the engines. He and Melissa looked up at a screen that showed the engine room. "Mel, get down there. Peter is overriding the controls. We've got to get the engines shut down before they explode."

Melissa passed the creature at the doorway without hesitation this time. She also gave it another squirt in the eye for good measure. It seemed to flinch but she didn't have time to examine it. Or the stomach for it.

She raced back to the engine room and found another creature there. She began spraying it as soon as she reached it, then moved on past and began to spray Peter. He blinked as if coming out of a trance. "Peter! Shut the engines down now!" She shouted to him. He nodded immediately, not noticing the alien by the doorway as he noted the readouts in front of him. The ship was dangerously close to red-lining.

Realizing that the creatures might still have some influence over Guido and Dr. Shaw, Melissa rushed back, opening the panels to their bunks and spraying them both without bothering to explain or wake them up. As she sprayed Dr. Shaw she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. The monster standing in the area of the bunks simply popped out of existence. Only a puddle of goo on the floor remained. She wandered the ship, looking for signs of the jelly monsters. Tony met her at the door to the command deck, a small hatchet in one hand. They exchanged a startled look, then he pulled her into his arms for a desperate hug. It took a long time for Melissa to quit trembling.

Tony, Guido and Peter checked over the engines which they had nearly overloaded to the point of explosion. Dr. Shaw examined the goo. It was all that remained of the alien encounter. It appeared to be soluble in alcohol, and Melissa's perfume had an alcohol base. There was no sign of where the aliens had come from or whether they might return.

They all sat together in the small galley and shared a breakfast of coffee and oatmeal. They were all shaken. They had vivid memories of doing something completely different. Tony had thought he was on the Ultra probe, before its problems. Diana said she remembered distinctly being in her apartment on Earth. Peter would have sworn he was back at MIT testing Eagle engines. Guido said he was at a family party on Earth. Dr. Shaw also had thought he was on Earth. Returning to reality aboard the Meta probe was a wrenching experience.

It was even worse as Peter and Tony described the stresses they had put the ship under. They had burned an unprecedented amount of fuel in the few hours they were under the aliens' spell. Their reserves of fuel-which had been considerable-were almost exhausted. They would need to reach Alpha soon-within the next two jumps, or else they might be stranded out here between the stars without the ability to return to Earth.

Melissa looked at Diana, who looked pale and drawn. "Diana, if you can't get us to Alpha, we're all going to die out here and this jump drive and all your calculations aren't going to do us or anyone else any good. Can you do it?"

Diana looked at her coffee cup and took a deep breath before responding. "I can do it." She looked at Peter. "Do we have the fuel for two jumps?"

He frowned. "Possibly. One jump for sure."

"It'll take one jump to get to their last known position. But if they've gone through another jump themselves we'll need to follow them."

"I can't guarantee that second jump."

Diana drained her cup. "Then if any of you believe in prayer, it's time to start praying." She stood and headed forward. The others took their places, ready to assist in any way they could. Melissa and Dr. Shaw cleaned up the galley and secured the passenger section of the ship. Two hours later Tony gave the signal to prepare for jump. Mel slipped forward and strapped herself into her usual seat. She steeled herself for the insides twisting that was a jump. Diana fed the last coordinates into the computer and pressed the button. Melissa closed her eyes and thought of Alan, of every time they had spoken, every time they touched, or smiled or loved each other. This had to work, it just had to.

Time seemed to stand still and when the peculiar twisting of reality that was a jump point began it seemed to last longer and feel more agonizing this time. They emerged from the other side gasping. Tony recovered quickly and began to scan the space around them. Guido followed suit.

"Contact." Guido stated. He turned their long range scanners in the direction of the contact and brought it up on the screens. He turned and grinned at the others. "You did it, Diana. That's the moon."

Ahead of them, scarred and lopsided, and dimmer than they remembered, rode the moon. Tony turned on the little-used communications gear. "Moonbase Alpha, do you read? This is Metaprobe. Come in Moonbase Alpha."

There was a heart-stopping wait, then a voice spoke in accented English. "Metaprobe? This is Moonbase Alpha. Status please?"

Melissa clasped her hands in front of her and leaned forward. Moonbase Alpha had responded. There were people there. They had been listening for a signal. She sat in a daze while Tony and Guido explained their situation. When a familiar voice came over the speakers, Melissa nearly cheered. If John was there, surely Helena and Alan were there too. John seemed skeptical at first, but they were finally cleared for approach and landing. Tony assured them that they could land easily on one of the Eagle landing pads. They could hear a good deal of pandemonium and celebration on the moonbase. Tony waved her forward and she could see Alan on the screen in front of her. She grinned at him and asked about her sister. Helena was in Medical Center, and Alan and John promised to have her there when they landed.

According to the transmission from Moonbase, they had been in space for years, not a few months. Just as Melissa's encounter with the sandman had indicated. John had advised them to land and they would decide how to proceed from there. Diana wasn't sure where her calculations were off, and John had insisted that they would devote Alpha's best minds to the problem, assuring Diana that she would be receiving credit for the ground-breaking navigational work she had done. John's diplomacy seemed to hit all Diana's buttons just right and she was purring and cooing at him in a most sickening manner.

It seemed to take an eternity to land. All safety procedures were followed adding to the delay, and Melissa was pacing back and forth nervously. The others joined her at the airlock as it began to cycle through. The first person she saw when the lock opened was John. His eyes met her and he gave a delighted grin. Then she saw Helena standing next to him and rushed into her sister's arms. Over Helena's shoulder she saw the man she had come all this way to find.

He looked at her with a calm smile and held out his arms. She moved from her sister's embrace and Helena seemed to understand completely. Stepping into Alan's arms was like coming home. The rest of the welcoming committee vanished around them as completely as the jelly monsters had. His lips met hers. There was no one else in the universe but the two of them.

When they came up for air he murmured in her ear, "What are you doing here?"

"I came to find you," she said. "You left before I could tell you something."

"What?" His arms encircled her, and she felt safe and secure for the first time in months.

"I love you." Her cheeks were wet but she couldn't tell if the tears were hers or Alan's, or both. "I'm not too late, am I?"

"No, love, not at all. Not at all."

Maureen J. Long

May 2000