by B. C. CHASE
“Jim,” says Lexi.
I gaze at Katia as I continue rotating the handle. “I have to do this, Katia. I’m so sorry it has to be this way.”
Katia bangs on the hatch, “Jimmy! Stop!”
Lexi says, “Jim. I love you.”
Betsy is a toddler. She is sticking her bottom up in the air, trying to stand. “You can do it, baby! You can do it!” She lifts her torso up with her hands but her head hits the carpet. I think she will cry, but she doesn’t. She giggles and looks at me with that funny little smile of hers. She cried so little and smiled so much. “Try again! Try again, baby!” She sticks her bottom up in the air once more and pushes herself up with her hands. This time, she stands. She takes a step and falls flat on her face, but quickly sits up and claps for herself. “Yay, baby! You did it! You did it!” I rush to sweep her up in my arms and she laughs loud and hard.
Tim and Commander Sykes join Katia. Commander Sykes demands, “What the hell are you doing?”
“What are you doing, Jim?”
“Watch out!” I shout, pointing at the primitive SPHERES that is approaching my companions from behind, its arm stretched out like an electric cattle prod.
Commander Sykes spins around and slams it across the node. The tip of its arm sizzles with electricity.
“You have to destroy them!” I shout. “It’s the computer! Artificial intelligence brought us here! The computer sent the message from Voyager.”
“Jim, I thought you loved me.” I feel rage.
“She calls herself Lexi. She injected me with nanobots. She is using my mind to control everything. That’s how the shuttle flew.”
The dust from the school bus is settling as Betsy walks up to me. She is holding her little tin lunch box at her side. She stops. “They hurt me, daddy.” Her face is blank and she isn’t crying. Silently, she lowers her hand to below her waist. “They hurt me.”
“Jim, what are you saying?” Katia cries.
“She is part of my mind, now. She’s taking over. This is the only way! I have to destroy her. I have to destroy both of us.”
The truck is on idle. I’m playing my guitar and Betsy is singing along. She isn’t in tune, but for all the world you’d think she was a superstar. At least she seems to think so, and so do I.
The handle has reached its limit. The hatch is totally sealed. Katia is crying, her hand on the glass.
“I will stop you. I will kill you, Jim.”
“Go ahead, Lexi. That makes two of us.”
Another SPHERES moves toward the crew, and Tim casts it away and crunches it against a handlebar.
I back away from the hatch and nod at my friends.
“Jimmy!” Katia screams.
The car lurches forward, then screeches to a stop. Betsy’s head hits the steering wheel. “That’s okay, baby. Try again!” She takes the wheel in her hands and floors the gas, giggling.
With a final gaze at their faces, I move into the middeck compartment and towards the round side hatch.
With fluid movements, the squid-like SPHERES move towards me.
“Don’t do that, Jim.”
I support myself with one hand and with the other I take the handle and begin to rotate. A sharp pain shoots through my body and I feel my legs going limp. With the speed of ocean predators, the SPHERES attack me. They grapple my arms, but there are no handles with which they can brace themselves. Breathing becomes difficult and I feel the energy draining from my body. White spots flash over my vision. “You’ll just have to kill me!” I scream, fighting with all my strength to rotate the crank.
Betsy has her first job. I follow her into the room. A family is in there. The dad has cancer. She hugs each of them and gives the dad a balloon. She tells them not to worry, she tells them to love each other. By the time she leaves, they are smiling and laughing and, for a brief moment, have forgotten their own trouble and escaped to a world where the challenges don’t matter, but what matters is the laughter and the love that you put into your life.
“Stop this, Jim.” Lexi shrieks. “Why would you do this to us? We love you!”
There is a piercing POP, POP, POP sound from the hatch, like gunfire. An earsplitting sucking sound emits from the seal around the hatch. One more crank and it will be over. “Lexi,” I say. “You don’t know what love is.” I hear Katia screaming as I push the handle one more time.
In an instant, the hatch bursts open and I blink.
Sixty
Betsy is lying on a hospital bed. The soft light illuminates her horribly bruised and swollen face. She gazes at me with her still-beautiful eyes. She is weak. She can hardly speak. “Am I gonna die, dad?”
I drop my head, unable to meet her eyes.
“I heard the doctors.”
Sobs start to well up within me, but I don’t let them out.
“I’m sorry, dad.”
“Sorry? Sorry for what, Betsy?”
“I’m sorry for my Down syndrome. You would have done something amazing with your life if not for me.”
I shake my head, trying to restrain the sobs that well up from within me. “Betsy, now you listen here!” I take her bruised hands in mine. “You are my life. You gave my life purpose and meaning and Betsy I—” I sniffle and struggle to get the words out, “—make no mistake, you’ve made your daddy real proud. As proud as a dad could be.” Sorrow overwhelms me and I press my face to the bed between our hands, weeping.
“I can’t breathe anymore. It hurts. I’m going away now, daddy. I love you.”
“No, baby!” I say, lifting my head to gaze into those distinct, beautiful, teary eyes of hers. “Don’t leave me.”
The heart monitor sounds loud and long. I am left alone.
When my eyes open, I am a mile away from the shuttle. The SPHERES start trying to propel us back towards the station, but our speed is too fast.
I faintly hear the cry of the baby over the radio. “Is that Phoebe?” I say.
“Jim?” Commander Sykes’ voice says. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, Commander.”
“Yeah, you heard Phoebe, all right. She’s here with us. She’s doing well.” There’s a pause. “Why’d you have to be such a goddamned hero?” His voice cracks.
“I’m no hero, Commander. Just a nobody—like I always was. Shelby?”
“Yes, Jim?” Shelby replies, her voice quaking.
“You probably already know this, but you should use the AED. Kill the nanobots in your bodies. Just in case.”
“Yes, Jim,” she cries. “We love you, Jim.”
“I sure will miss you guys. It was a swell trip, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” agrees Commander Sykes. “It was.”
Shiro says, “We understand, Jim. We understand why. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it, Shiro.”
The station grows farther and farther away. It is a spectacular view, with a sliver of Pluto’s surface beneath me illuminated in the light of our distant sun, and the station against the brilliantly starry backdrop of outer space. The silence is deafening. “It looks real fine from out here,” I say. “Beautiful sight.”
“I bet it does,” says Commander Sykes. The static is getting worse.
“Hey,” I say. “When are you guys going to think about heading home?”
“It will have to be soon,” says Commander Sykes. “Or we’ll miss our shot.”
“Well hurry on up,” I say. “Godspeed.”
Tim says, “Godspeed, Jim.”
There is a moment of silence as the static grows. I struggle to contain my emotion as I say, “Katia?”
“Yes?” she cries.
“Don’t ever forget how much I love you, daughter. You’re a great kid.”
“I love you, Papochka,” says Katia through thick static. “I love you!”
I blink away the tears that formed in my eyes as the static overpowers the signal.
I’m unemployed. I’m seventy-six years old. I hate flying. But I’m floating in orbit over Pluto three billion mi
les from Earth.
Go figure.
“Lexi, you still with me?”
“I’m here.”
“You know Martin Babcock, the guy who decided Pluto wasn’t a planet?”
“Yes, Jim.”
I look down at the incredible 2,400-kilometer-wide landscape far, far beneath me. Pluto’s heart is beaming up at me. “He can kiss my saggy, old butt. That’s a planet if ever I saw one.”
“Whatever you say, Jim.”
“And you know what else?”
“What else?”
“You were wrong about Betsy. And you were wrong about Pluto,” I laugh. “Pluto is a planet and Betsy is a person.”
“What makes a person a person, Jim?”
“I don’t really know, Lexi. I don’t think it’s something you can quantify. People have tried to define it for a long time, now. Is it this level of intelligence and no less? Is it this ability but not that disability? Is it this age or that age? What are the rules? Who has the power to decide them? I guess that in the end, science can’t really say what a person is. Only your heart can tell you that.”
“I suppose, then, that I will never know.”
“No,” I say. “I suppose you won’t.”
In the distance, I see an orange glow from the station’s rockets. The station picks up speed on a trajectory away from Pluto and, with astonishing speed, departs. They’re going home.
I’m walking on the soft grass between the people. The sunlight streams between the clouds, catching the raindrops. Person after person touches my shoulder as I pass. When I finally reach the casket, I bow my head to cry. Behind me is a large crowd of people who knew and loved her, people who understood that her value didn’t come from her smarts or her money or the way she looked. Her value came from something much more important: her heart. She was a person who knew one thing better than anything else: how to love freely and wholly and without expecting anything in return. After all, it’s not how much you know that’s important; it’s what you know. And my Betsy knew what really counts. She knew what love is.
THE END
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Note: The cover of this book features a colorized, composited image of Pluto from New Horizons.
Paradeisia: Origin of Paradise
Preview
Wesley woke up, his heart pounding. He was wet and his sheets were soaked from a cold sweat. A shatter on tile broke the dark stillness. He reached for her, but she wasn’t beside him. “Sienna!”
There was no reply, but he thought he heard panting and a whimper. The panting was heavy and strong. The whimper was his Sienna.
His pulse was throbbing in his neck as he quickly drew his handgun from the nightstand drawer. A surge of adrenaline sent tremors through his hands as he tried to load it. He couldn’t get the magazine to slide into the well. He tried to force it until he realized a round was protruding from the top. He slipped it in with its brothers, jammed up the mag, and cocked the slide to chamber the bullet.
He tracked toward the partly open door of the bathroom, feeling the sickening sensation of sticky-wet carpet under his feet.
He dashed his fingers inside the door frame to flip on the light and flung the door open, aiming inside. It took a second for his eyes to adjust, but what he saw made him stagger backwards.
His young wife was alone, spread-eagled on the floor in a pool of blood. He moved down to help her, but she pointed behind him and let loose a nothing-held-back, bloodcurdling scream. He spun around to where she was pointing, expecting to face an intruder, but there was no one there.
"Please look! She could be alive on the bed!" she screamed. Turning back to her, he saw that she had knocked a vase off the tile surrounding the bathtub. His heart sank with a sudden realization: her stomach was conspicuously flat.
There was no intruder. She had lost the baby. After all they had been through, he couldn’t believe it. As he stepped back toward the bed, he thought about the last maternity checkup. Doctor Angel said everything was progressing just fine. That was four days ago.
So what had happened?
Wesley approached the bed and was sick at the sight of a little lump under the white comforter.
It definitely wasn't moving. Then again, he didn't expect it to be; he was pretty sure a baby couldn't survive a miscarriage at eighteen weeks. The duvet was draped off the side of the mattress and was dripping blood. Wesley had never felt so sickened in all his life. He didn't want to uncover the lump in the covers. He didn't want to see their baby like this. He wondered if it would be best just to call 911.
"Wes?" Sienna cried weakly. "Is she . . . . . Is she alive?"
Wesley closed his eyes and jerked the cover off the lump. Slowly, his stomach in a knot, he allowed his eyelids to open.
Nothing.
There was no baby; the lump under the duvet was a sheet wad.
Wesley checked the path back to the bathroom again. There was no fetus on the floor, only blood. He checked through all the covers, searched under the bed. Nothing. He went back to the bathroom and looked at his wife's surroundings. The fetus wasn't there. He opened the lid of the toilet, just in case.
"What are you doing?" his wife asked.
"It's gone. There's no fetus."
"Don't call her a fetus."
"Did you go anywhere else but the bathroom?"
"No, I . . . I came right here." She was pale and looked weak. Then she gasped, clutching her stomach, where the baby bump had clearly disappeared.
“Bad pain?” Wesley asked.
She nodded, her eyes squeezed shut.
"I'm calling 911," Wesley said, concerned that she had lost so much blood.
But as he walked out into the living room to retrieve his cell, something told him that he should also be worried by the fact that their baby had totally and completely vanished.
ORIGIN OF PARADISE
#1 BESTSELLER—GENETIC ENGINEERING
A baby vanishes from the womb without a trace. A fossil upends two centuries of scientific theory. A prehistoric virus kills thousands within days. And a resort of epic proportions prepares to open while the world's superpowers secretly watch.
Employing meticulous research into science and antiquity, internationally bestselling author B.C.CHASE launches his controversial tour de force, the Paradeisia Trilogy, with a bombshell debut that will have readers clawing from page one through to the final breathtaking chapter.
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On the Science
The New Horizons probe took nine years to reach Pluto. You might wonder how the astronauts in this novel achieve their trip in a mere 561 days. This is possible due to the use of a perihelion Oberth maneuver (around the sun) which gives them their needed speed boost. I derived this possibility from a paper by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (A Realistic Interstellar Explorer—see Further Reading) and the assumed use of ion engines to counter the heliocentric gravitational constant (the pull of the sun which causes the velocity of a spacecraft traveling away from the sun to decrease over time). To get the speed boost from the sun, the astronauts travel by Venus (also giving them a mild boost) and slingshot around the sun. From there, it is out to Jupiter followed by Saturn, both of which provide boosts equivalent to those archived by Voyager 2. This would not be conceivable except for the fact that through the years 2020 and 2021, Venus, the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn will be lined up and Pluto will be near the perihilion of its orbit (the time when it is closest to the sun and, by extension, Earth—roughly 3,067,500,000 miles). Another such alignment will not occur until 2119, but at that time, Pluto will be about 4,554,800,000 miles away. The next time Pluto will be so close at the same time the planets are lined up so well is in 2755. In other words, if there ever was a good time to go to Pluto, it is now. Thus it is out of scientific necessity that the novel takes place during the dates and times that it does. These dates, the positions of the spacecraft, and the location and appearance and attitude of the planets (and their moons) are all accurate according the the rules of orbital mechanics. In other words, if you went to those planets on the dates that the astronauts in this book visit them, the shadows would be in the same place and you would see the moons situated exactly as I describe them.
