City Of Phase

by George Willson

  “Hang on, Kelvin,” Blake said, jumping up to stop him from leaving. “I’d really like to know what you’re talking about.”

  “Probably twenty years ago, Mr. Gorm, here, came out with a book that he claimed was a transcription of a log from a spaceship that crashed onto our planet,” Velata explained. “This ship supposedly contained the ancestors of every person on this world. It was considered a mediocre piece of fiction without a grain of evidence to support it, despite his claims of truth.”

  “What does that have to do with us?” Perry asked.

  “In the log I found,” Kelvin explained, “it mentioned three people who weren’t part of the original voyage, but showed up out of nowhere near the end of it. I considered changing it to make it more believable, but I figured I’d leave it as it was because these people helped the crew of the ship to find a planet to make their own since the ship was full of settlers. The three people’s names were specifically mentioned in the log as Blake, Perry, and Michelle.”

  “Yeah, that does kind of sound like us,” Perry commented.

  “Such is one of the narrative breakdowns of his tale,” Velata said. “People don’t—”

  “Just appear out of nowhere?” Blake finished for him. Velata stared at Blake, realizing that Blake had originally mentioned just appearing in the middle of Carburast like these people had just appeared in some spaceship. Blake had picked up on what was going on here.

  “So where can we get a copy of this book?” Blake asked.

  “You really want one?” Perry asked. Blake looked at him, and Perry had picked up on their situation as well.

  “Sort of,” Blake replied. “I don’t know if I could bring myself to read it yet, though. Too weird.”

  “This has got to be a joke,” Velata said.

  “Dr. Velata, you knew about Michelle, and we never told you about her, did we?” Blake asked. Velata responded by shaking his head, but in a manner that said he was growing weary of a bad joke drawn on too long.

  “All that I’ve told you so far is the truth as I know it,” Blake said, carefully qualifying it. “I can tell you that neither of us have ever been to this planet before, and Michelle has never been anywhere else as she only just joined us. Either we have a cosmic coincidence, or you have just let us know that at some point in our futures, we will visit your past.”

  Kelvin and Velata stared at them without a word, and Blake patiently waited for them to process what he had just said. Finally, Kelvin shook his head and turned to leave.

  “Yeah, this is a joke,” he said. Blake followed him.

  “Kelvin,” he said, and Kelvin turned to him with an annoyed expression. “Can you show me this manuscript?”

  Kelvin’s lack of amusement did not change, but after a moment, he finally sighed and nodded his head.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Kelvin Gorm lived in an unassuming three bedroom house buried within a dozen others in the town of Festra. He had a couple of vehicles parked in the drive out front, a yard that was not overgrown, and a paint job just a few years into needing to be redone. Inside, the furniture was very well used, though Blake could see a touch of past opulence within it. Like the outside, the interior showed that it was wearing out little by little, and needed a little updating to bring it back.

  They followed Kelvin through his little home to one of the bedrooms where he had an old desk and chair with some kind of unfamiliar computer terminal. Off to one side of the desk was a pedestal on which sat a clear box lit up like a display case with what appeared to be a stack of loose leaf paper inside. It was in this box that Kelvin invited them to look.

  “I found this in a box with a lot of other very old documents,” Kelvin said. “Sort of stumbled across it, really. I was treasure hunting in a cave when I found it. I brought it home and went through it. Most of the stuff dealt with life and such, and a lot of it just disintegrated when I touched it, but this one was different.

  “It told this fantastic tale from space that felt so real, I wanted to believe it was true. I searched for evidence forever, but it happened so long ago, there was nothing left.”

  “And that’s where his story broke down,” Velata said. “No evidence.”

  “Based on your calendar,” Blake said, never taking his eyes from the documents in the box, “it may well have happened fifteen hundred years ago. Do you know the basis of your year numbering?”

  “It’s supposedly based on the establishment of Domus,” Velata said. “That’s what’s been passed down anyway.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Hector said quietly, possibly remembering when Blake had asked how long Domus was the capital, and he had noted that no one had told him. To be fair, he was under considerable duress at the time.

  “And before that?” Blake asked continuing the conversation with Velata.

  “Not much information, I admit,” Velata said. “Our written history is fairly recent.”

  “Not much or not any?” Blake asked.

  Velata thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “Not any that I know of. I suppose it does seem like it all sprung up out of nowhere.”

  “People tend to forget what happened before they were born,” Blake said. “The further back you go, the less people know about it. Fifteen hundred years? That’s the stuff of legend.”

  Blake looked into the box and read the first page, which was handwritten, but neatly so. A good amount of the page was disintegrated, as Kelvin described, but Blake was easily able to read most of it.

  I am taking the time to transcribe the audio log of our voyage from Earth from the original recordings before the ship no longer functions to the point that these can be retrieved. We are cut off out here, and I doubt anyone will be able to keep the power cells on the ship alive for very long. Most of the ship’s command crew died in the crash or the events leading up to it. Fortunately, a significant number of our passengers did survive, and the terraformer has done its work admirably. Here follows the log of Captain Harold Warner and others of the crew along with observations from myself.

  Lieutenant Jack Long

  Starship Mirificus

  “I recopied the entire thing carefully when the first page, there, started to fall apart,” Kelvin explained. “I preserved it in that vacuum sealed box when I was done to help it survive long enough to prove its legitimacy.”

  “Which could not be done since he would not remove it from the box,” Velata said. “He said it was too fragile.”

  “It is fragile,” Kelvin said.

  “It does look very old,” Perry said.

  “Appearances aren’t everything,” Velata noted.

  “Dr. Velata,” Blake said, “one of your boxes mentioned a Mirificus Incident. What is that about?”

  “My boxes?” Velata asked.

  “Your secret stash of documents in the subway?” Blake prompted.

  “Oh,” Velata said, recalling what Blake was referring to, “the only research I ever did on it. I’m surprised I still have it, and equally surprised you remember seeing it. The book made a bit of a splash when it came out, and there is still a cult following who believe in it. I dug around for references to this Mirificus, and while there are some scattered references here and there to the very archaic word, nothing I found suggested interstellar travel.”

  “Did the manuscript give a year?” Blake asked Kelvin.

  “5347,” Kelvin replied proudly.

  “And where was the ship headed?”

  “Keppler 22b.”

  Blake nodded thoughtfully, piecing it together in his head along with what he already knew about that era of Earth history.

  “There may be something to this,” Blake said.

  “This coming from someone whose name is in the story,” Velata noted.

  “On Earth,” Blake continued, ignoring Velata, “Keppler-22 was the name of a star, one very much like the one that Earth orbited and similar to your sun as well. 22b was a planet in what is considered the habitable region o
f that star’s orbit. In addition, terraforming those ‘habitable region’ planets to force them to support life was common during that time period, so it would seem a bunch of people from the year 5347 set out to colonize it.”

  “That’s what the log says,” Kelvin confirmed.

  “And that’s what everyone who has read the book knows,” Velata countered. “The ship contained a machine to terraform the planet just in case it failed to support life, and instead, all kinds of chaos broke loose, the ship was thrown off course, and it ended up here instead. They terraformed this rock, and settled here. So his book claims.”

  “I have a test for you, Blake, if that is your real name,” Kelvin said. “Not every bit of information in the logs is in the book because I did have to try and make it a sensible narrative. There were some notations in the margins of the log.”

  “I told you,” Blake said. “If that were us, then it hasn’t happened yet. I would not be able to answer any questions you have about it.”

  “How did you come to be on Keersh?” Kelvin asked.

  “Sorry?” Blake searched Kelvin’s face trying to figure out what he wanted to know, but came up empty.

  “What brought you here?” Kelvin asked. “Velata does at least believe you aren’t from here, so you had to have arrived from somewhere somehow. How was it?”

  “You’re looking for a name?”

  “I know that something was written in the margins of that manuscript,” Kelvin said, pointing to the documents in the case. “I want you to answer my question, and I’ll be convinced. By what method did you travel to our world? I think only the Blake of the story would know the answer.”

  Blake considered carefully how to answer. At some point, he will have to tell someone on a ship how they came to be in their presence, but what would he say? Would he still give a straight answer? Would he give some other word to satisfy them? Of course, knowing now that he’ll have to say something then, it might affect how he will answer. The Guide never lets him forget, so he will know once they get on board the Mirificus what is going on. There was only one logical way to answer.

  “The Maze?” Blake answered. Kelvin looked at him, surprise creeping into his face. Blake suspected that Kelvin felt the whole thing was a big farce, and he was simply happy to entertain people interested in his book. Kelvin turned from Blake and supported himself on his desk.

  “What is it?” Hector asked.

  “I’m convinced,” Kelvin said solemnly.

  “Why?” Velata asked.

  “There was a question in the margins of those pages,” Kelvin answered. “I’ve never told anyone what it was, and though I faithfully copied the margin notes along with everything else, I never included this in the final book because it didn’t tell anything that I thought was important. It actually didn’t make any sense.” Kelvin looked at Blake. “It said, ‘What is the Maze?’”

  “I don’t understand,” Velata said. “What is the Maze?”

  “That’s where we’re from, for lack of a better explanation,” Blake explained. “We’re not from Keersh, as you know, but our method of travel is via a machine we call The Maze. I can’t tell you much more than that mainly because even though we travel within it, we aren’t told much about it.”

  “Is it a space ship?” Kelvin asked.

  “No,” Blake continued. “It opens a sort of doorway between two points in space and time. That’s how we will eventually come to be on a spaceship midflight fifteen hundred years ago. It hasn’t happened for us yet, but I suppose it will.”

  “Can you stop it from crashing?” Velata asked hesitantly, with more than a touch of worry creeping through. “Now that you know what will happen anyway.”

  “No,” Blake assured him. “What happened happened. We can’t change that no matter what we do. I’m tempted to read your book, Kelvin, but my better judgment says it would be a bad idea.”

  “Can I read it?” Perry asked.

  “There really isn’t time either,” Blake said.

  “Right,” Perry said.

  “If we accept that this did happen,” Velata said, now coming around to believing it, “why isn’t there any evidence?”

  “Why would there be?” Blake asked.

  “What?” Velata responded.

  “This ship crashed here,” Blake said, “and its occupants had to start from scratch building a life from nothing. They only had the ship and this world to work with. They very likely dismantled the ship and worked it into everything else at the time. Over the years, those parts were replaced and destroyed. Nothing lasts forever, but fifteen hundred years? Very few things last one hundred years, so expecting to find something technological from that far back is borderline insanity.”

  “But it is supposedly the foundation of entire world,” Velata insisted. “What happened to the records?”

  “Kelvin, here, found them, apparently,” Blake said. “Maybe something happened to their repository, or maybe they just wore out when no one recopied them. It is not considered a religious text, and clearly no one cared enough to pass the story on, so like billions of things that happen every day, it was just lost to time.”

  “Well, since this wasn’t entirely lost to time,” Velata said, “when you do get there, can you have them note something about Carburast? I read the book before I worked on that city, so maybe have them mention not to make the phase shield? Or at least place a safety switch outside of town or something?” Blake shook his head.

  “Even if I did say something like that,” he explained, “and convince them to put it in their log, that will not change the fact that the shield is active now, meaning that nothing would change as a result.”

  “It would create a paradox,” Perry said.

  “We’ve discussed those,” Blake said impatiently.

  “It’s true though,” Perry insisted.

  “Yes, it would meet the definition of a paradox, but since paradoxes are impossible, it’s sort of a moot point,” Blake noted, but Velata decided to play it all out for himself.

  “So if you went back and said ‘don’t activate the phase shield,’ there would be no phase shield to deactivate, you wouldn’t be here, and so you wouldn’t have a phase shield to deactivate, and would not mention not activating it as a result. Without one here, and no mention to leave it off, then we’d turn it on, and here you are again.”

  “Right,” Blake confirmed. “The so-called grandfather paradox where preventing an event negates the circumstances under which you would know to prevent the event. Or more specifically, if you went back in time to kill your grandfather, you would never have been born to go back and kill him. The truth is that what has happened will happen, and what will happen has already happened making the paradox hypothesis impossible.”

  “That would mean you live through this,” Hector pointed out.

  “I would consider that likely,” Blake said. “We just don’t know how at this point, starting with how to get to Carburast.”

  “So tell me this, if you can,” Kelvin said. “Was the Mirificus real?”

  “Almost definitely,” Blake said, surprised that Kelvin felt the need to ask. He supposed that years of being ostracized for believing it would likely make one a bit skeptical. “You found my current team in a story under the exact circumstances where we might appear there. The likelihood of someone making that up is incredibly remote.”

  Kelvin nods and smiles, a peace clearly washing over him.

  “There is still that problem of finishing your present, which is Carburast,” Hector said, interrupting the moment.

  “Indeed,” Blake agreed and turned back to Kelvin. “Sir, I do have to ask. Do you have a vehicle of some kind we can use? Ideally, one of us should return it, but given the states of the last two we drove, it might not be in the best of conditions.”

  “You have validated a big part of my life,” Kelvin said happily. “Come with me.”

  One of the vehicles parked in front of Kelvin’s house looked like a
large pickup truck with a four person cab and reinforced front end that looked like it could take down a brick wall. It also appeared very old and not in the best of shape, but Blake figured that as long as it made the trip, it would be perfect for their needs.

  “This?” Hector asked skeptically, before turning his gaze hopefully to the smaller aging sedan beside it.

  “It has seen better days to be sure,” Kelvin said regarding the truck, “but based on what you told me of your journey so far, it may be just what you need. It runs, and it will definitely get you to Carburast without any problem. I can promise you that.”

  “I believe this will work nicely. Thank you,” Blake said and turned to Hector. “Are you all right to drive?”

  “Absolutely,” Hector confirmed.

  They said goodbye to Kelvin who did not wish to come with them, especially since the vehicle would not hold him along with the other four. They resumed their places in the vehicle with Hector and Blake in the front and Perry and Velata in the back. Hector fired up the electric motor and smoothly backed out of Kelvin’s drive, leaving a much happier man than the one they had found when they arrived.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They found the main road out of Festra heading toward the highway, and Blake figured that they would arrive at their underground entrance in an hour or so depending on how fast the big vehicle went. Once on the main road, Hector pushed the speed, and it was easily able to maintain what the government sedan was able to do.

  Hector quickly settled into his natural driving rhythm at the stick of the large vehicle, so their ride back to Carburast was surprisingly smooth. Despite its rough appearance, the vehicle Kelvin provided rode like a dream, and Blake encouraged Hector and Velata to deliver the vehicle back to Kelvin if they could when this was all over with their sincerest thanks. Naturally, they agreed.

  They had taken a fork to the east some distance prior to the approach to Halloway’s base and were now approaching the forest that surrounded Carburast on every side except the south. The side road skirted around the far edge of the trees though Hector said they would be taking the next left to start making their way to the back side of the city where the tunnel had let out.