Free Visions of the Future by Joe Haldeman, David Brin, Greg Bear, Kevin J. Anderson, Ben Bova, Hugh Howey, Robert Sawyer, Ray Kurzweil, Martin Rees

did either, Kelric admitted. But gods, I loved her. To the image of Cory in his mind, he thought, Good-bye, my love. Then he took a deep breath and directed his thoughts outward, focusing them enough so they would reach the computer. Glint, figure out a course that will get us home as near to when we left as possible. He gave voice to the realization lifting above his grief like a bird in flight. If there’s a way to get back alive, I want to do it.
    I’ll do my best, Captain. After a pause, the Glint thought, I’m ready.
    Kelric fired the thrusters. The stars shifted position, but nothing else changed. He fired them again, trying not to dwell on how little fuel he had left. The stars collapsed into a point, their sluggish photons lumbering towards him as he leapt farther and farther into the past. He fired the thrusters—
    And ripped in two.
    Kelric snapped like a rubber band pulled too far too fast, its torn edges writhing in space, screaming, screaming…
    Suddenly he was whole again. He felt ill, dizzy, disoriented, as if his body had reset.
    “We inverted,” the Glint said.
    Kelric swallowed. Why did it feel so strange? After a moment he realized the Glint had used the com instead of their neural link. He spoke out loud. “What happened?”
    “The top of the plane, including the top of your body, inverted two picoseconds before the rest of the craft.”
    Good gods. “Am I normal now?”
    “Essentially.”
    “What do you mean, ‘essentially’?”
    “Only 99.99 percent of your mass reinverted.”
    “What didn’t come back?”
    “The missing molecules are distributed throughout the lower half of your body.” Then the Glint added, “We gave it a go and most of us went.”
    Kelric managed a wan laugh, trying to ignore his bizarre mental image of 0.01 percent of his body doomed to forever hurtle into the past. “What happened to my cyber link with you?”
    “The reinversion scrambled it.”
    “Can we still get home?”
    “Yes. However, we no longer have enough fuel to slow down.”
    “Raise the beambox threshold again,” Kelric said. “Then do the bit with inverting the fuel.”
    “We still won’t collect enough before you run out of air and suffocate.”
    That was it? He had almost made it back only to find he couldn’t stop? He couldn’t accept that. “There has to be a way to get home.”
    “Getting home is easy,” the Glint said, “But when we arrive you will be dead.”
    Kelric grimaced. “You’re encouraging.”
    “What do you want me to do?”
    He touched the spare tank on his survival suit. “Can you tap my emergency air reserve?”
    “I already have.”
    Kelric sat absorbing his situation. Then he snapped his fingers. “I don’t breathe in quasis.”
    “This is true.”
    “So crank up the beambox threshold and put me in quasis until we reach Diesha.”
    “It is inadvisable to your survival to remain in quasis that long.”
    “Dying isn’t advisable to my survival either,” Kelric said. “What’s the problem with quasis?”
    “It prevents the arrangement of molecules in your body from adapting as your environment changes. If you stay in too long, your environment will change too much. When you come out, your molecular wave function may not be able to readjust without catastrophic fluctuations.”
    Catastrophic who? “Meaning what, exactly?”
    “Every atom in your body is hit with a force when you come out of quasis,” the Glint said. “It’s because your environment has changed. And those forces aren’t necessarily in the same directions. The more your environment changes, the bigger the discrepancies. Go too long, and it could tear you apart atom by atom.”
    Not exactly how he had planned to end the day. “You’re my environment,” he pointed out. “And you go into stasis, too. That means you can’t change. So neither does my environment. In theory.” Of course, theories usually described an ideal case, which was far from what they had here.
    “That might