Universes have no dead ends. Or so thought the lovelorn pilot, as he struggled with the pod's joy-stick.
He was so alone, he began to believe in himself as the one true God. The viewfinder was not a direct window but a slightly disjointed image of the pod's surroundings - being a device to prevent Angle Blindness from which early space travellers suffered. And, by means of such a viewfinder, he saw vast doors in the side of Space opening and shutting, making it the devil's own job to steer the craft through the frames, depending on the pod's inbuilt Translator to cope with the non-alignments between sight and reality.
The intercom burst into fitful life which, in itself, was not surprising, since it often needed no direct Originator. Unknown to the pilot, the receiver simply fed off generations of radio echoes with which the bouncing walls of the universe played eternal Catch.
"Ancient message to future man. Ancient message to future man." The intercom spoke through the typical static of the past, since Universes were by nature inefficient places, badly needing Time's traffic wardens to guide the various bustling items of past, present and future round the unexpected corners of a finite Universe...
Finite Universe! The pilot was abruptly brought short in his moitherings. Surely he hadn't thought that thought! He stared at the intercom, believing it had bitten him. The joy-stick throbbed in his hand as if his own emotions transferred by this medium into the pod's very inner workings. His religious upbringing as a boy had been geared to the awe of pure, unfettered immensity: like the man in prehistoric London who had stood in the zoo grounds staring wide-eyed for the first time at a giraffe and saying he just did not believe it.
But then, gradually, Infinity became two-a-penny, like giraffes themselves and rhinoceri, white elephants, rocs...
"Ancient message to future man..."
He shouted back at the intercom: "Cease thy daftnesses..." But it didn't. It began to sound convincing.
The pod jerked as he pulled the joystick into a position that it was not meant to be pulled into. The viewfinder lost its view, but not before each door of the Universe slowly closed even as he watched. Thus trapped, he remembered the girl he had left on Earth: the one he loved too much - necessitating this out-trip towards memory-loss. He managed to prod the joy-stick into its rightful groove, the pod's gears grating and grinding in the process.
"Oi! Oi!" came the gruff tones of the jobsworth Traffic Warden type from the intercom: "I've got bleeding kids crossing this here road and blighters like you are a real menace..."
There was a horrid noise as the pod lurched through body-flesh. The pilot somehow knew he had just killed a little girl on the crossing - the girl who was, by all accounts, due to become his only truly love in the one all-embracing future.
The various affinities and infinities of Universes are the very life-blood of Fate and of its mistress Coincidence. He wept as he pulled the joy-stick right back so as to test the strength of this particular Universe's upper reaches.
Future man tried to warn the past, but it was already too late.
As God hid Himself behind His own non-existence, the beasts in the Old Zoo grunted and darkness crept from the licquorice bowl of night. It was the dare-devil's own job to ride the fairground of space.
(published 'Neophyte' 1992)