“We look forward very much to getting regular transmissions from you during the whole time you travel back to Earth. We will give you six hours to carry out of A20590X any supplies you think may prove useful to you. A20590X’s trajectory will be reprogrammed so that it follows your ship at a safe distance and therefore can be made to speed up and fly beside your ship and take you and the baby aboard in case something goes wrong with the space ship in which you will live (A20591X). A spacewalk will be tricky but can be done. Both of you practiced doing that many times during your training. You should have no trouble with space walks. We can also talk you through it in case you have forgotten some of what was taught you. We hope and trust, of course, that nothing untoward will occur.
“Needless to say, all of us down here wish you well and are chomping at our respective bits in anticipation of seeing you again. In the meantime, we trust you will have a safe, enjoyable, and productive, all-expenses-paid voyage through the cosmos. You can regard the trip as your honeymoon, a honeymoon that takes you to a faraway world called Earth.
“While we want you to enjoy yourselves, we also expect you not to forget to be productive. To be blunt: We want that dictionary. Beyond that, we want to know everything you can recall about your stay on that planet and about those beings who shared their lives with yours during the time you were there.
“Not just us but the whole civilized world participates vicariously in this adventure of yours. All the world is incredibly excited about what has happened with you; all are very curious to find out as much as possible about what you have undergone. When you return, you will be quite the celebrities—not only the two of you but also your child whom the tabloids will no doubt call ‘star child’ or some other name of that sort.
“Get ready for endless interviews. Get ready for being hounded by the Paparazzi. Get ready for the parties and the cruises and banquets and the invitations to foreign lands and the meetings with royalty and the ticker tape parades. We know that you are both rather private people, having lived fairly solitary lives, but perhaps you can bring yourselves to enjoy the fuss that will be made of you as well as some of the fringe benefits that undoubtedly will come from that time of celebrity.
“And, we, on our part, will do what we can to insure that you have some privacy even as you undergo your time of celebrity. We will get a house ready for you. During our transmissions, you can tell us where and in what kind of place you would like to live. We will do whatever we can do for you so that you can enjoy your return to Earth.
“Well, I suppose I should put an end to this transmission. Take care of yourselves. Welcome home.” The screen then went dark. Their ship’s computer said, “They are really happy to get you back. So are we.” The other computer asked, “Did I do a good job of telling them what you wanted me to tell them?” “You did an excellent job,” Peter said.
The next few hours were spent carrying food and other supplies from the ship that would travel behind them to the ship where they would be living for the next couple of years. They found also a secure spot where they could put the baby’s bassinet.
They tried sending a message to the creatures down below. They tuned the transmitter to the frequency the teacher had given them and relayed this message. "We are on the surface now and inside the space ship that will take us back to Earth. We have heard from Earth. Everything is okay there. The people there are excited to see us. In two years, we will be back in that other home of ours and miss being with you.
“But we hope we can stay in touch with you. Who knows? Perhaps someday we will be able to return for a visit or perhaps someday you can send a delegation to visit with us. We hope so. We miss you. Goodbye for now.” There was no answer. And never once, during the months and years that followed, did they receive any response to any of their transmissions from the creatures inhabiting the asteroid where Sylvia was a guest for three and a half years and Peter for eighteen months.
Chapter 66: Returning Home
Six hours after receiving the transmission from Earth, their space ship fired its rockets and soon thereafter entered the flight path that would bring it, the two astronauts, and the child back to Earth with the second space ship following closely behind.
The trip back to Earth passed relatively uneventfully. First the ship with the passengers and then the second space ship landed on the pair of space platforms that awaited them in a desert located in the American southwest.
Crowds of people were waiting behind fences for the space ships to land and for the humans aboard one of the space ships to appear after opening one of the doors.
When a door opened and the people did indeed appear, the crowd standing on the desert sands shouted and clapped and took pictures. The astronauts waved. The child, now no longer an infant but a child of two years, a child who walked and talked, stood in front of his parents and, at the urging of his mother, also waved to the crowds.
The three of them had their time of celebrity as they knew they would and as had been predicted by Mr. Bounder. There were the ticker tape parades, the invitations, the cruises, the banquets, the interviews, the writing and publishing and signing of books, and the lecturing before huge crowds at the openings of the exhibits of their artifacts.
Despite being somewhat uneasy about the time of celebrity that they knew they were bound to experience, they ended up not minding it too much. This was in part because, during the whole of that time which lasted much longer than they anticipated, they lived and dined in luxury. They also became rich and were able to live and dine luxuriously even after the time of celebrity faded. And they had each other. And they had ways of keeping from taking what was good in life for granted.
Though attempts to communicate with the creatures inside of the asteroid were made from time to time, there was never a reply. No attempt to find and reach the asteroid, beginning with the arrival in its vicinity of the ship that had been outfitted with automated burrowing equipment, succeeded in locating it.
Though its path through space had been well charted which ordinarily would have meant that it would have easily been found, it was not found. Various explanations for this seeming disappearance were bandied about but, with no evidence to support any one idea over another, scientists had to simply accept the fact of the asteroid’s disappearance without being able to know why. There were a lot of ideas though, one being that the asteroid had been hit by another asteroid and that the collision proved fatal to it because it had been so hollowed out by its industrious inhabitants. That was not the only idea however about what happened to the asteroid.
Some thought the asteroid might have been a space ship in disguise and that, after the humans left it, the creatures altered its path through space. As a result, any space ship coming across that asteroid would not know it was the asteroid where the mite-like creatures lived, especially in light of the fact that the evidently artificial structure on surface of that asteroid had been obliterated. According to this idea, the creatures had managed, simply by altering the course of their little world and wiping clean the surface, to escape the fate that so worried them, the fate of the Incas and Aztecs.
THE END
A Theory of Gravity Page 44
