I woke from the transient craziness of a visit to a new universe feeling light.  Reaching down, I touched jagged rock beneath me, but it did not jab, slice or pierce my back.  Instead, my five pound push in the darkness shoved my body upward, and my face into contact with another rough surface.  I bounced between them like a pinball, a couple times, until it ceased to amuse, and I braced myself in the micro-gravity.

My nose was dripping blood, and so I focused inward, and pulled the blood back into my body, and clamped off certain open minor veins with miniature telekinetic clamps.  A burst of psionic energization activated my body’s repair systems with a vengeance.  In thirty seconds, the damage was well on its way to healing.

This ‘psionic energization’ is a large part of what doctor’s mean when they talk about ‘will to live’ or ‘failure to thrive’.  Its related in some respects to that feeling you have when you’re on top of the eight ball, and in control of the situation rather then behind the eight ball which would be the absence of this feeling or the ‘failure’.  And what an esper with this type of healing does is take this to the next level, and learn to manipulate and focus such energies or perspectives.  Empathic healing is a totally different process, and visualization healing is a distant cousin to Energy Flow Healing.

And since it was pitch dark, I tried clairsentience to get some idea of where I was before I began wandering about in the gloom.  Nothing with a capital "N" came back.  I ran through my other psi powers, and the only thing that got any effect that I could test that is (You can’t test mental possession without a target, for example.) was a TK pulse.

So hoping I wasn’t in that rather unpleasant reality I’d heard described as Tristram’s Labryrinth, an endless maze of monsters in the eternal dark, I began to explore my new suroundings by small push, and bump.  I don’t know how long I followed those winding tunnels that went up and down, spiralled left and spun right, and only very occasionally did they divide into two tunnels. 

I tried very hard to keep a mental image of the path I was taking even as thirst crept up on me.  My duffel bag was nearby, I could tell from the vector changes.  For a verser, such as I, will sense the direct line to the physical items he brought to his current universe.  He does not sense distance, only direction.  However, if the sense for direction changes quickly, it means you are close to the item. 

And then I caught a glimpse of blessed light.  Eagerly I followed it as it grew, and yet at the same time I felt chill drafts beset me.  Fearful, I pushed onward, my horizontal body someimes just clearing the walls of the small rock tunnels I passed through.

And then I saw a star-lit chamber shaped like a small bowl and filled with milky white light from the glass bowls overhead.  I pushed up, and looked out into space.  I could feel the chill leaking through the glass from the absolute zero of space.

A bit worried, I yanked out one of my hairs, and set it loose in the air.  And then I followed it as the source of the draft made itself known.  I could not see the leak which arued for a pinhole leak.  Problem is, such things had a way of getting larger, although even if it didn’t, I was finished unless I fixed it.    Air would leak out, and bone-snapping cold would leak in. Since I hadn’t chewed a piece of gum in at least five decades, I was out of luck there.  And I really needed to resupply on my duct tape the next chance I got.

It looked like I was in an asteroid, although what the looping tunnels were was anybody’s guess.  The place felt abandoned.  But, I called out in eleven different languages for help, and stating that I was not a threat.  The only response I got was a cockroach scuttling out to see what was making all the racket.  And yes, I tried to talk to it, just in case.

The metal cabinets along the bottom of the room were empty, and one was hanging loose, although almost shut.  It looked like a thorough, but quick evacuation.  Right now, I could be absorbing enough rads to fry an egg, and I wouldn’t know because my duffel bag had my geiger counter (well, it did a lot more than that, but thats enough fr now.)  I really wondered what would make someone leave this nicely appointed, if rather small apartment.  If I was lucky, it was because the mines had played out, and if I was unlucky it was because a bio-weapon had been unleashed here.

A sudden thought struck me.  Perhaps my duffel bag was….I went and looked out the dome windows some more, and noted the frost on the window edges that had not been there before.  By the movement of the stars I would say we were in a longitudinal spin with a tumble up and over every fourth spin.  It was taking about twenty minutes to do one tumble, so this was very slow.

And now I really needed to check on the pinhole.  I saw frost gathering around the hole, and a glimmer of an idea hit me.  I spat.  It bubbled, froze, and then shattered.  So I spat again, and again, and again, and then finally, I felt the stillness in the air.  However, a gentle touch to the small ice mountain of spit that covered the hole let me feel it trembling.  There was no telling how long the stresses from the differential heating from inside (bearable at fifty degrees) to probably a couple degrees above absolute zero for the outside would let it survive.   

I went out and looked again, and this time after five minutes of searching, I saw the duffel bag thirty feet outside the window, and floating in space.  We spun lazily past it, and a few minutes later, I saw it again.  But this time, I had a destination and a plan in mind.

I had spotted a glitter among the stars.  Your typical asteroid belt is not like what you see on television.  There are a few lonely chunks scattered with much space between them.  But, I could see what had to be powered light.  So the next time, I saw the duffel bag, I gave it a telekinetic push toward the far away asteroid.

If the people there could track it, and they probably could, they would see in their computer memories that it had behaved as if it were powered.  And hopefully that flight path would lead them back to me.    

So I spun, and pushed with five pounds of force, and spun some more.  The temperature continued to drop, and I started shivering.  A quick bit of exercise, and some practise at a microgravity kata of the Tiger Form Kung-Fu warmed me up nicely.

The duffel bag was getting harder to see as it got further away, and I occasionally missed it now with my telekinetic push.  But a repeated five pounds of force can do wonders in micro-gravity environment.  It was whizzing along.

However, I was really starting to get cold.  So I began the PT exercises for Space Marines (which I had washed out of on Tempus Four because I had repeatedly hit my commanding officer.  They were the type of hardnoses that understood that sometimes a man just has to punch someone in a fit of fury, but they said my ‘cold, calculating maneuvers left them with no choice, but to believe it had been planned.’  I hadn’t disagreed since the only thing that hadn’t been planned was someone pulling me off him before I broke his legs.)  So while I was a round peg in a square hole, the Space Marines did have a really intense workout that left me trying to wipe up with my shirt little blobs of sweat that floated in the air.

After that, I waited a few minutes by the window.  And then while I still retained some heat, I ripped the metal cabinets from the wall, and some tiling from the floor, and clambered into one of the tunnels.  The cabinets were my walls which I placed about my body.  The tiling served three purposes.

I wrote a message on the back of one piece, and stuck it in the window.   Some of the tiny pieces I used to wedge around the corners of the cabinets since the cabinets did not fit flush into the tunnels.  And I used the largest strip of tiling as my blanket.

With two cabinets near my feet, blocking in heat, and two near my head as I curled up between them, I was not bad off.  The holes around the edges were rough-filled in, and the blanket of rough tiling was clutched over my right shoulder as I floated in darkness.

For a while, I was warm.  And so I dreamed, and prayed, and enjoyed the rest, and the joy of communion.  And then despite my efforts, I began to shiver.  When that got too much, I moved energies around in my body.

Under my control, I could burn fat to produce heat better than the body’s normal program.  However, this took decades to learn, and so its understandable that normal humans don’t have this ability as it would do them little good.  Besides, my ability was more in partnership with my body’s ability rather than totally suplanting it.

I drifted through strange dreams, and wondered if I should have instead used my telekinetic pulse to push me, and therefore my asteroid.  But it was too late to change now.  I’d lost I’d estimate about thirty pounds.  And while my haven was cold, I guessed that the exterior of the cabinets was well below zero.

In extremity, I turned on the power for my Lekostian cybernetics that laced through my body.  It did not provide much heat as the aliens of the Lekostian Star Empire made very good and quite stealthy armor.  And heat radiating would have defeated the point of stealth.  But still I felt a trickle of blessed heat come back into my bones.

But it was not enough.  And so I searched through the mental options presented by the device even as my mind tried to stray from the cold.  I saw a "Max Power-Override" and gave it push.  And blessed heat warmed me nice for the next hour.  And then it stopped as I had used up a year’s worth of power.

Still, that gave me, I estimated, another five hours of warmth.  What was taking them so long?  Didn’t they know a man lay out here, in need? 

In my deprivation, the knowledge that it had been a slim chance indeed, and that even if they found it, they might not be human enough to recognize what I was asking for had faded.  My hope had become a certainty, and them not showing up with buckets of hot potato soup, and chili burger soup, and hot chocolate laden with melted marshmallows was a betrayal of the highest order.

My rage and fury at those traitors kept me warm for a while longer, and then I began to sleep.  I’d jerk awake, and wonder why.  Something in the back of my mind was trying to tell me to stay awake.  If I slept, I would verse out, it was screaming at me.  But, I could hardly hear it.

Instead, I mumbled back in great exasperation, and tried to sleep.  But the training was too ingrained, and I kept coming back awake.  Feeling more and more put out, and more and more like the universe hated me, and I might as well have a pity party, I grumbled, and began to rage and sighed.  It was silly, I knew.  So, I prayed some more, and found calm.

Unfortunately calm is not spelled W-A-R-M.  The shivers began racking my body, and I feared as my feet flashed out that I would kick the cabinet loose, and let in a flood of negative hundred degree air.

And then my foot did lash out in a spasmodic jerk some time later.  It crunched the cabinet, and I waited in quiet cool to see if it would push past one notch of rock that I could hear was holding it.  It didn’t, I could see as the cabinet stopped vibrating.

And then the whole thing splintered into pieces that were covered with hoarfrost several inches thick.  Metal breaks at extremely low temperatures, I reminded myself ruefully.  And then as the bolt of freezing cold slammed into me, and sucked the air out of my chest (I’ve been hurt less by a magician throwing a bolt of ice at me than that dreadful air.), I wondered why I could see the ice.

Light from a brilliant point source extended down the tunnel.  The woman in a space suit with a light blazing on her right shoulder stepped closer.

"He’s alive! Twelve days, and …"

I smiled faintly, my lips cracking in the intense cold as I saw my air freeze to the walls of my hideyhole.  Sure, I was alive for about ten seconds more.  I had almost made it.

I mouthed the words "Thanks" since there was no air not frozen, and waved a hand.  It broke off, and I fell to pieces.

This is how ghosts stories start.  I hope mine was a good one about a ghost who found home after he was seen.  I hope I didn’t give the lady from Search and Rescue as it clearly said on the outside of her suit, nightmares for the rest of her life.  But if I did, there wasn’t much I could do about it.  My adventure in that universe was done.

I had versed out.