The Anomaly

A Reunion

Travel, it is often said, broadens the mind, and yet Ernest Morrison had learned two new things by vowing never to leave home ever again. He had discovered, first of all, an unexpected capacity in himself for routine. He had become set in his ways, and having done so found that he rather liked it.

His daily schedule involved rising early, eating a slow breakfast, leaving his quarters at ten minutes to eleven exactly, and arriving at the space station docks ready to start his working day on the dot of the hour. Today had been spent helping the stevedores move cargo at the warehouse, this being his role when not required for the starship repairs that were his primary occupation. Both jobs represented a criminal waste of his very special talents, but Ernest no longer cared about things like that. Late in life he had hit upon one of the Universe's great secrets: that an afternoon spent in manual labour makes the first beer of the day taste that much colder.

This was his second discovery, and each evening he would put it to the test.

#

The bar was filled with the usual low-life. Necessarily so; there was no high-life on Miramar Station. There was night life, but this was it: a dingy bar put together out of imitation wood in an effort to create a bubble of familiarity within the non-human structures of the repurposed derelict that was the station. Life here was cheap: anyone could set themselves up, all that was needed being the will to endure. With plentiful free real estate available on squatters' terms and all the economic opportunities of a trade route waystation, the place could have sustained a much larger population than it did. Instead it was limited to those prepared to live among its alien geometries and peculiar auras. Ernest didn't mind. As a starship navigator, he had once roamed spaces vastly more convoluted than this one. On the contrary, the place for him served as a maintenance dose, a steady infusion of strangeness that helped keep at bay any notion of a return to his former profession. He sometimes wondered whether any other navigator would wash up here and make the same discovery, choose the place as a home. So far none had. That wasn't really surprising: one exit route predominated over all others in Ernest's profession – and it wasn't retirement.

#

Ernest stopped at the bar. No words were needed, not even a nod of the head. The ritual took place in silence: chilled fluid into chilled glass, the tap of wallet on scanner to authorize payment, the first sip. On cue, the barman smiled and nodded an acknowledgement as Ernest placed the drink back down on the counter. As always, the touch of glass on lip had wrought a change in the expression on his face, shifting it down a gear from disdain to mere neutrality, admittedly in one of its more subtle variations.

Ernest was a man of habit. Had the ritual played out in full, he would now carry his drink to his usual seat, settle in for a period of quiet rumination. Looking the part of a small man with small thoughts. In due course he would become gregarious, but not until he had savored the full extent of peaceful solitude offered by that first drink.

What happened instead was a shock of recognition, Ernest coming to a sudden halt half way across the floor. Over at the bar, regulars raised their heads in surprise at this abrupt violation of the natural order. Ernest blinked, looked again. No, it was no mistake: there he was, holding court in the far corner of the room. The Capt'n. How could he have missed him? The universe was a big place full of bad things – one of its few saving graces was that it contained only one The Capt'n.

Abandoning his time-worn trajectory, Ernest turned and walked across the room, halting at the edge of the small gathering that had accreted around the old spacefarer. Throughout this sequence, the Capt'n's voice never faltered. Years of separation acknowledged only by a flicker of the eyes, the merest millimeter of an eyebrow raised. Still the same old Capt'n: however much his integrity might be on sale, one thing he would never do was interrupt a story. As a code to live by, Ernest granted, it was an advance on nothing at all.