The Engines of Dawn by Paul Cook Read Free Book Online

clapper to a bell and now the sound, though inaudible, was ringing throughout the spaceborne university.
    Holcombe turned a whitish green. He stood up. "What the hell was mat?"
    "I… think it's the ship," Julia said. "Something's happening to the ship!"
    The chorus to those remarks came in the form of a series of alarms that Julia had never heard before, not even when the gray mist ate away part of the physics department just a few hours earlier.
    Another wave of nausea hit her and this time she thought she was going to throw up.
    Dr. Holcombe braced himself against the edge of his desk as all sorts of items rattled and crashed to the floor.
    "Dr. Holcombe!" Julia cried.
    "We've been blown out of trans-space!" Holcombe said. "It's the Engine! I think the Engine's going to explode!"
     
     

7
     
     
    Ben had never been in trouble before, at least the kind of grownup trouble that required the intervention of lawyers. Thankfully, Eos University had an aggressive Rights Advocacy Office whose lawyers took umbrage at just about everything university Grays- or Grays anywhere-did. Eve Silbarton instantly summoned Captain Cleddman, who, in turn, called on the Rights Advocacy Office, who, in their turn, sent Messrs. Kerry Wangberg and Winn Sammons, who came tout de suite. They demanded that Mr. Fontenot show cause for his arrests, and since Mr. Fontenot really couldn't, he was forced to downgrade the charges to a mere reprimand, which Ben didn't like either. He told Fontenot so, but Mr. Fontenot was persuaded to let them all go anyway.
    Once Ben's interview with campus security ended, he found himself half a mile from Babbitt Hall with nothing to do. It was, by then, late Friday night and it was far too late to see about finding a female for companionship. But considering his recent performances-or lack thereof-it was probably just as well that the women he'd had in mind were out of range. Melissa Lozinski, a math major; Colleen Lamb, a seriously sexy Navy ROTC student; and Peggy Shumaker, a mask-maker in Fine Arts whose breasts, when unmasked, were said to be legendary. They would remain such, thanks to the Ennui or saltpeter or whatever it was that plagued him.
    So he decided instead to go to the student health center. A young man his age shouldn't be having performance problems, and the staff at the student health center usually had the answers to everything. Or most everything.
    To his surprise, Ben found the student health center fairly busy at that hour. He counted eight miserable-looking students in the lobby waiting to see the next available doctor.
    At first Ben wondered if the students in the lobby had suffered side effects from whatever it was that destroyed the physics lab- burns, broken bones, and the like. But that didn't seem to be the case. Mostly, these students just seemed depressed. There were five young men, three young women.
    Triage got him in to see one of the doctors an hour after the others were cycled through. On his way to an examination room he passed a ward filled with sleeping students. He couldn't count the number of students held there, but he guessed it was over twenty. That seemed high to him, for a university the size of Eos. But what did he know?
    Ben climbed into a gown, feeling like a little kid putting on his jammies. The door to his cubicle opened and an attractive woman in her late thirties entered. A faint aura of perfume had come in with her and its caressing fingers surrounded Ben where he sat on the examination table.
    "You must be Benjamin," the doctor said, consulting her chart. "I'm Katrina. Katrina Larsen."
    Ben blushed. She wore no wedding ring and smiled at him familiarly. Even so, the woman's aura, hint of pleasantly large breasts, even her shapely mouth, could not rally his "boys." Inwardly, he bewailed his fate.
    "So what brings you to me tonight?" she asked in a very musical voice.
    Ill at ease, he said, "Are there always this many students in the health center?" Ben jerked a