Read My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire for Free Online Page B

idea of being on a spaceship. There were no portholes or viewscreens that I could find. For all that I could see, I could just as easily have been in an underground bunker, or a very spacious submarine. And, suddenly, weirdly, I was homesick, because I was actually in space, and there was no way of going back. I was not going to play football in Dallas again; I was not going to spend anymore nights barhopping in New York. Of course, I wasn’t going to jail in Texas either. I consoled myself with that.
    Measuring time by my body clock—I think my watch was still in Cleveland—the ship took three days to reach the outskirts of the solar system. There was no sensation of movement. We walked around without restriction—or I did. Everyone else looked busy. About the middle of the fourth day, there was an announcement of some kind overhead. It was followed by a bump, and the whole ship shuddered. Then it became quiet, and even the muted buzz that had filled the ship went away. I didn’t know it then, but we had made our transition into a wormhole. In fact, I didn’t even know what a wormhole was until a lot later. Since most of you will probably never have the opportunity to travel through one, let me try to explain how they work.
    Interstellar travel is feasible only because wormholes exist. A wormhole is not really a tunnel; it is a property of space that provides a means of moving from point A to point B without having to traverse the ordinary three-dimensional distance in between. They can be entered anywhere the local gravitational field is weak enough, although for obvious reasons, the mapped ones are around stellar systems. A ship doesn’t so much enter a wormhole as interact with it. A burst of energy is released and the ship goes elsewhere. There is still a physical limit to velocity in a wormhole, but it is vastly different than in three-dimensional space; in fact, it varies from wormhole to wormhole. There is a distance between going in and coming out too, but it is different than the distance in normal space.
    Time is funny, too. The net effect of transiting a wormhole is that you cover vast distances in the three-dimensional universe in days and weeks instead of years and centuries. The empire could not exist without them. In fact, you could say that the empire was built on wormholes, a prophetic statement if there ever was one.
    Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. What I did know was that travel through a wormhole was just as dull as travel in normal space. Aside from the jerk at transit, I didn’t perceive any motion. Had the transit not been announced, I would have been unaware of it. The things that did catch my interest were things in the ship.
    Clothing was the first of these. I’d been wearing blue jeans and a Dallas T-shirt, both slightly on the gamey side, when I left. I didn’t need Angel to translate the instructions that they would not do on the ship. Pirate or not, Carvalho’s crew wore uniforms, tight black trousers, black boots that came up just over the ankle, a plain, ocher tunic and a wide belt with holders for tools and weapons. The cloth was light and slippery, something like a mix of silk and polyester, but without the shiny appearance. I rather liked the way I looked in it.
    Everyone had a shipsuit too. It appeared to be a one piece replica of the uniform. Angel showed me a thin, red seam that ran from neck to groin, concealed under a flap. When I slid my finger along this, the front of the suit split open, and I put it on like a pair of coveralls. At first, it fit like a poncho. When a green patch at the waist was pressed, however, the suit responded like plastic shrink-wrap. In less than a minute, I was wearing a perfectly form fitting suit that remembered the shape it had fit itself to.
    The suit’s memory was hardly its only remarkable feature. Altogether, it was maybe two to three times the thickness of regular cloth. The inner surface was composed of filmy material