“Well, Mira, it seems we should go home. Agneta needs our help,” her grandfather replied.
He turned to the distant shrubbery and waved at the man still sitting on the grass, indicating to the stranger that he could come.
Chapter 16
Miriam, in her late thirties, had morphed in to a woman taller than average height, although her red hair and green eyes remained the same. She and her youngest son—a boy with chestnut-colored hair and a narrow face—were fussing in their kitchen. It had darkened outside and she switched on the lamp; its sunlight-warm color fell like a velvet sheet over the furniture and everything else in the room.
Miriam kneaded the dough. From time to time, she threw glances into an electric oven nearby, checking her shortbread cake in case it was burning slightly.
The child had nothing to do there, but his bandaged throat showed that no one was going to let him go out on this cold autumn evening. He almost never visited the kitchen, except on days when his mother was baking a cake.
“Mom, what are you going to give me for my birthday?” he asked after a few minutes of pensive wandering between the kitchen cabinets.
Miriam looked at her son, smiling. “Georg, be patient—you are already a big boy. Tomorrow you will be seven years old.”
“Will grandmother Agneta becoming for my birthday?” The boy changed the subject, seeing the futility of his attempt.
“Everyone will come. Why are you only asking about her?”
“Just asking,” the boy uttered, as if nonchalantly.
“I get it,” Miriam said. “You want to pester her with questions about rockets.”
“I’ve never pestered her,” Georg tried to debunk his mother’s shrewdness. “Yesterday, she told me that along with my birthday we will be celebrating that the rocket has finally arrived at its target. Mom, is that true? Are there those horrible monsters on the planet where it’s going, like in the movies?”
“Monsters? Who knows? We will learn about it only when the ship informs us of its arrival on the planet,” his mother answered, and involuntarily recalled the day when she first saw Agneta and heard about the ship. At that time, the wounded and exhausted woman had said that it would be twenty-five years before the first expedition arrived at its destination. And then a battle had happened, and the retaking of the NPP, during which her beloved grandpa Antony had perished.
How quickly this huge amount of time had elapsed, she pondered.
“Mom, can you hear me?” Her son’s insistent voice brought her back to reality. “When will the ship inform us? Also tomorrow?”
“No, Georg, if its message is sent tomorrow, it will arrive when you are your father’s age—fifty-one years old,” his mother replied.
“Wow!” The boy exclaimed, amazed and disappointed at the same time. “It’s very boring to wait so many years!”
Instead of answering, Miriam opened the stove and took out the baked cake, placing it on a metal brazier on the kitchen table.
Georg gladly inhaled the smell of vanilla cookies, and asked, “Will there be photos and videos? Will we find out if there are indeed monsters there?”
“Why not? Certainly we might see that,” Miriam assured him.
After that, she emptied the roasting pan and laid out on it a new rectangle of dough. Georg also found something to do. Unbeknownst to his mother, he was tearing small pieces from the shortbread cookies, still hot as flames.
“The other ships will send us photographs from their planets, and we will also see them together!” The boy proclaimed, persistently looking into his mother’s eyes, hypnotizing her, not allowing her to notice his feeble efforts.
Smiling, Miriam wiped her hands with a rag, then squatted down in front of her son, took his forearms, looked into his eyes, and said, “Son, when the message from the rocket that is supposed to land tomorrow comes to us, I’ll be over eighty years old. And this will only be true if the signal arrives just in time. Before receiving the reports of other ships, there are decades and even centuries of waiting.”
Georg blinked in embarrassment and hesitantly asked, “How can you see photos of other rockets? You…” The boy stopped. Suddenly he felt at a loss, frightened of the realization he had made for the first time in his life.
“Yes.” Miriam confirmed his discovery, mandatory for every sapient creature. “You will see messages from the rest of the ships without me.”
The boy frowned. Seeing changes of expressions on his face, Miriam understood that he was assimilating a new, mysterious part of life. However, it didn’t last long, because it was precisely at Georg’s age when a person realizes the existence of death and doesn’t perceive it as a significant phenomenon. At his age, the end of life looks very distant and vague, lost in infinity.
“What will happen? Will we die one after another, while the ships fly and fly?” Georg asked finally.
“We will consider that later. Now we need to focus on relatively simple things, like spelling, for example,” his mother stated.
“Oh Mom! Why?” the boy immediately became upset. “It would be better if you tell me again how our great-grandfather Iason saved space travel. He did save it, didn’t he?”
In response, Miriam stood up and shook her head. She thought for awhile and then said with feigned frustration, “Oh, all right, wise guy! You’re lucky it’s your birthday soon.”
The boy gazed at her without believing his ears. Seeing this, Miriam grinned and answered his question, “Yes, he did. If they hadn’t left just then, later, when civilization collapsed, people would no longer have been able to make rockets.” Having said this, Miriam resumed her affairs and put the next batch of dough in the oven.
“Mom, why did it collapse? What does ‘collapse’ mean?”
Miriam meditated, weighing the sense of talking with her little boy on this complex subject. She decided that it would be better to at least say something to describe the past in a simplified form, rather than to say nothing.
“The word ‘collapse’ means complete destruction. It happened because a small part of the world’s population was very rich, and a much larger part was poor, almost starving. They became very angry. Is that clear to you?”
The boy nodded resolutely and his mother went on, “The angry people launched…mmm, showed their discontent, which quickly spread throughout the world. During those disorders they, among other things, destroyed agricultural machinery. But without technology, you can’t feed as many people as lived on the Earth back then. A very severe famine began, which, together with the mutiny, ruined civilization, that is, a cozy and pleasant life. Now people are rebuilding it.”
Georg, supposedly listening carefully to his mother, yawned. In response, Miriam squinted and said with a smile, “I think I’ve already explained everything you wanted to know.”
“Yes, it is very clear. Please, tell me about Great-Grandpa Iason,” the boy persistently reminded his mother.
Miriam giggled genially and almost stroked his head, but remembered just in time that her hands were covered with flour. Instead, as she cooked, she told again the story of the past, which she knew from the words of her kin.
Chapter 17
Someone might think: if I wanted to, I could spend my whole life in the same place, and thus my location in space would always remain unchanged. But this can’t be done in relation to time. Whether I want to or not, I won’t be able to just stay in the same moment.
Actually, that person would be wrong, because to be forever at the same point in space is tantamount to being stuck in the same moment of time. Returning to prior locations is like returning to the past, because space itself is inflating, just like time does. It’s just that space does it without it being visible to the naked eye.
Georg also considered time to be the only reason for leaving childhood behind. He had nothing against it—it was a natural occurrence. But the fact that the main occupation of his life constantly upset him seemed very unnatural to him.
Today, time had treated him
ruthlessly again, and appeared to have destroyed his last hope. Now Georg felt as if he had lost consciousness, but somehow his brain could still show him pictures of the past, reminding him of how he’d reached this terrible state.
Decades earlier, he’d had no doubt that he was an incredibly lucky man to live in this era, when he could learn the results of three of the remaining five expeditions.
After the sixth mission had reported that it had completed its acceleration, centuries had passed and no more news had arrived from it. Against the background of other ships sending their signals exactly on schedule, the sixth one was declared lost and the radio telescopes stopped tracking it. As a result, only five expeditions remained active.
The firm belief that he would learn the fate of three of them had warmed Georg’s heart. That he would see the nature of distant worlds and maybe, he hoped ardently, would see another planet inhabited by people.
Well, how could he have foreseen that he would not only know about three of them, but even the fate of the fourth expedition, and instead of the joy that this knowledge would bring him, only a sense of the catastrophe that had occurred remained?
Now that he had learned of the failure of the fourth mission, Georg sadly recalled the collapse of his hopes in the span of the past three decades. The day the message had come from the first expedition, sent to the Eridanus constellation two hundred and forty-three years previously, had imprinted particularly clearly in his memory.
At that time, Georg—already a gray-haired man with an oblong head, carefully shaved narrow face and deep-set eyes—awaited that signal in accompany with his aged mother Miriam.
They’d entered the SQP project when first Agneta, and later her colleague Hans, had passed away. Thus, mother and son became the employees of the radio telescope, and were waiting for the mission’s message in the room of the signal office center.
In that room, located on the second floor of the service building, there were three computers and two broadband radio amplifiers. In addition, a sofa stood near one of the walls, and the kitchen equipment next to another. An electric transformer and auxiliary equipment occupied the ground floor of the edifice.
Sixty days and forty-three years had passed since the expedition had supposedly touched the surface of the distant celestial body. The radio wave had needed the forty-three years to cover the distance between the planets. To that time it could be added a delay, an interval which the expedition may have taken to prepare the radio line for interstellar communication, or because of other reasons. At least, now it was obvious to Miriam and Georg that the mission hadn’t sent its report during the first sixty days.
Over the past two months, Miriam and Georg had cast countless hopeful glances at the central display. In response, the gadget indifferently and constantly showed them the same picture that many radio astronomers before them had seen: a useless image of the cosmic background.
Georg recalled that on that special day the weather had corresponded precisely with a northern autumn. By noon, large snowflakes had begun to mix more and more with a cold downpour, diluting the noise of the rain dripping against the windowpanes.
Usually, Miriam and Georg never appeared in here at the same time. They met only during the shift transfer.
“I wish the snow didn’t cover the plate.” Peering into the sky, Miriam sighed.
The weather also worsened her son’s mood, but for a different reason. He grumbled, thinking that instead of going home, he would have to leave the station—and in such a storm—to clean the huge parabola with a specialized electric cleaner.
How could it happen that a signal that can be sent at any time within thirty years after landing would come exactly that day? He was about to tell Miriam this when one of the computers made a high-frequency sound, and then three more of the same. Mother and son both looked at the screen and, gradually realizing the essence of the image depicted on it, exchanged perplexed looks.
Neither of them dared trust their eyes, and tried to find confirmation in the gaze of the other: the event to which they had dedicated their lives had happened.
The radio had received a landing notice!
They weren’t mistaken. There was no room for error. The screen turned white, and against this background, an extremely unambiguous message appeared, written in large black letters: “Landing Report. The first mission landed on the fourth planet in the system of the 58th star of the constellation Eridanus. This message was sent from the surface of the planet. The original message is written to the computer’s memory. Open it now? Y/N”
They had been ready for this event all their lives. They knew that the ship was moving toward its destination on schedule. The control signals arriving on Earth for centuries were confirmation of that. However, the message that the expedition had reached its goal temporarily deprived Miriam and Georg of their ability to act and to think.
Instead of immediately familiarizing themselves with the information, they became statues. Their behavior absolutely didn’t correspond to that of scientists and researchers. It was not so easy to believe in the fulfillment of the event that had been expected for so many centuries.
At last, Miriam showed signs of life. She put one hand against her chest and pulled her glasses from the pocket of her green knitted sweater with the other. She left the window and headed for the computer. Georg, who had been making coffee, abandoned the process and went in the same direction. They walked carefully, as if sneaking up on a chicken intended for slaughter.
“It’s impossible. Will we really see a new planet?” Miriam finally said in a voice hoarse with excitement. She sat on a chair and extended a finger toward the button on the keyboard, but at the last moment stopped in indecision.
Georg also froze, hesitant. But after a few seconds, he shook off the numbness and called on common sense for help, “Mom, the legendary SQP was created just for this purpose, for people to see this moment! Of course this is information about the planet. What else could it be?”
Miriam exhaled noisily and jabbed the button. As a result, text appeared on the screen: “On December 28, 2304, the landing vehicle entered circular orbit around the planet…”
What followed these first words were the results of preliminary studies from the near-planet orbit. It informed the earthlings about surface properties, atmospheric composition, magnetic field, ore reserves, and many other features of the celestial body.
Unfortunately, the astronomers’ joy didn’t last long. Georg still vividly remembered the poisonous disappointment of that day.
“In the lower atmosphere, the level of radiation exceeds the deadly threshold for humans by 2.1 times. On the surface of the planet, this figure is estimated to exceed 2.4.”
More accurate data expressed in appropriate units, sieverts and grays, followed. But what did it matter?
Leaning back in her chair, Miriam asked in a crestfallen voice, “So, is this the wrong planet?”
Meanwhile, the message indicated that after the planned one and a half years, the device had completed space research and the computer had activated the protocol for landing on the surface of the planet.
The machines continued to operate according to the schedule. The planetary ship landed, and the computer activated semi-autonomous mobile machines, i.e. robots. There were two in each expedition. These devices left the lander and explored the surroundings. Then, according to the plan, they installed a parabolic aerial for interstellar communication. In this stage, artificial explorers had collected samples of air, water, soil, and the tissues of living creatures.
These studies confirmed baseline radioactivity data, which allowed the software to draw the following conclusion: “The planet is not currently suitable as a human habitat. Therefore, the life assembling instrument will begin to implement plan B.”
After that, it seemed that Miriam had ceased to understand what was happening before her eyes. Georg clearly remembered his unpleasant feeling when he he’d seen how his mother’s face had cha
nged dramatically. Her eyes, radiating hope, joy, and excitement just a moment ago, sharply faded and no longer resembled human ones. As if someone had transplanted them to a cold-blooded creature.
Georg understood. In that short period of time, while they were studying the report, his mother had realized that she had received the full information regarding the mastering of the galaxy. There would be nothing more. She was unlikely to live to see the report of the next expedition. Georg wanted to cheer his mother up but didn’t know how to do so.
Later on, mother and son calmly studied the information that had been sent from a distant planet more than four decades ago. For example, the biological laboratory had been unable to determine to which biological kingdom—of animals or of plants—the living matter of the planet belonged. The machine only established that it supplied the local atmosphere with free oxygen.
The report concluded with information that they already knew: plan B would prescribe the creation of primary forms of earthly life most appropriate to local conditions. Thus, the mission’s bio-lab should have created bacteria and plants resistant to radiation. Namely: Deinococcus radiodurans and Thermococcus gammatolerans. Evolution would do the rest, if it succeeded.
“Good,” Georg said joylessly. “Let’s talk to the committee, find out what mood they’re in. Maybe they’ll be happy?”
“Why?” Miriam raised her eyebrows. “Because this extremely expensive expedition flew almost two and a half centuries to discover another useless Mars-like planet?”
“No, Mom.” Georg tried to somehow dispel her sadness. “The situation isn’t so bad. This envoy, although unsuccessful, still contains encouraging facts in its report.”
He began to bend his fingers and as he listed: “First, now we know that the equipment created centuries ago worked properly. Second, we always believed that life exists somewhere else apart from the Earth, and to prove the opposite was the same as believing that the Earth was the center of the Universe. But from now on, the existence of extraterrestrial life has become a scientific fact.”
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