“Don’t mind us,” Adrian says, waving to them.
“It’s blue?” I say, shocked by what I’m seeing.
“Beautiful, huh?”
“Can I?”
“Sure,” he replies. “But don’t touch.”
“Oh, I know,” I say, walking gingerly across the concrete floor. “Flight hardware, right?”
Winches hang from rails mounted on the ceiling some forty feet above us. Chains suspend an Apollo-era Command Module roughly a foot above the floor. The distinct cone-like shape is unmistakable, but it’s been mounted sideways. The heat shield is facing away from me instead of down at the ground. To my surprise, the capsule appears sapphire blue. Light reflects off the brilliant blue tape lining every inch of the module.
“Why is it blue?” I ask.
“Our engineers have struggled to decipher some of the materials used in the original Apollo. Often, all that remains is a cryptic name, like Mylar, but we understand the use-case. What you’re looking at here is thermal insulation. A reflective silver layer will be added once the final assembly is underway.”
I crouch not more than a few feet from the capsule, marveling at the shiny material. To my eye, it looks like it’s made from silk.
“Come,” Adrian says. “We don’t want to be late.”
“For what?” I ask, getting to my feet reluctantly. I have so many questions.
“We’re having dinner with Victory.”
“Victory?”
“She’s the architect,” Adrian says. “Victory is the brains behind all this.”
“And this is?”
“An appeal to our captors. They haven’t imprisoned us. They’ve released us. They watch us. They send newcomers like you. Sometimes, we see their craft in low orbit, catching the sunlight. They drift across the night sky in a matter of minutes.”
“And you think if you can get up there?”
“We can get some help,” he says as we walk down the main corridor. “You must feel it—the loss. Tens of thousands of year’s worth of progress. Gone. We’re trying to reclaim all that in a matter of decades. As it is, we’re struggling to isolate things you and I took for granted growing up, like vaccines and antibiotics. And they’re just sitting up there. Watching.”
I ask, “What makes you think getting up there will make a difference?”
Adrian opens the door to a conference room, saying, “We could at least make our case.”
“Ah, there she is,” an elderly woman says, getting to her feet. She takes both of my hands in hers and turns my wrists over, kissing them. Yeah, I’m not liking the touchy-feely in this age, but I try not to let that sour her introduction. She means well. I’d like to see if she’d do that to a guy she meets for the first time.
“I’m Victory. Please, take a seat.”
“I’m Jess,” I say, being polite. “Victory’s an unusual name.”
“These are unusual times.”
“That they are,” I say, looking around.
The room is massive, far larger than any conference room I’ve been in. If anything, it’s a section of a warehouse used for meetings. The boardroom table is thirty feet long, but it’s off to one side, nestled in the corner. Throughout the room are various relics from the Apollo era. I spot dismembered control panels, cross-sections of a heat shield, a Command Module hatch. I run my fingers over the A-frame of a flight couch. It has a leather headrest, a five-point seatbelt harness, and canvas cushions. Most of the walls are covered in blueprints and notes. Bits of string have been used to tie points together like a crime scene, but I get what they’re doing. There are so many subsystems within Apollo they want to make sure everything is given context.
“Your eyes,” Victory says, seeing my interest in the technical drawings. “They betray you.”
I’m not sure betray is the right term, but I get her point. On the way to the table, I linger beside a diagram outlining the stages in a Saturn V rocket. Adrian pulls out a chair for me near the head of the table. A plate of steaming hot food is placed in front of me by a waiter.
“Thank you,” I say, looking at generous portions of roast potatoes, carrots, pumpkin, and what I assume is sliced roast beef.
I ask, “Do you know what happened to me? How I got here?” Adrian shakes his head, but I persist. “Anything about my life in the Procyon Alpha system? Or the moon Erebus? In orbit around Styx?”
“I’m sorry,” Victory says. “Most of our history has been lost. What little we have has come from digs in the old cities, but even then, it’s largely guesswork.”
I nod, lowering my head a little, realizing I may never learn what happened to Gal or Pretty Boy. To me, they were right there beside me only yesterday. It’s difficult to comprehend the passage of time sweeping them away, but this has always been our fate. Oh, sure, a few people defy the odds, like Tutankhamun, Julius Caesar, and Shakespeare, but even they’re known in name only. The details of their lives—the real details, not just raw unfeeling facts—are lost. What they thought, who they loved, the things that made them laugh and cry, all that is gone. Part of me wants to cry, but I know it’ll be misunderstood. I bottle up my sorrow for later.
Victory seems to sense my grief for the past. For a moment, she leaves me to eat in quiet, but I’m worried about the future.
“What do you know about them?” I ask, gesturing with my fork. I point it up on an angle in the direction of the Moon.
“Not much,” Victory says.
“Has anyone ever seen them?” I ask. “These aliens?”
“No.”
I’m chewing, so I take a moment and finish before continuing. My pause, though, is as much strategic as it is polite. I want them to deeply consider what I’m about to say.
“We ran into aliens in the Procyon Alpha A system.” I set my knife and fork down and take a sip of water. “They lived on the moons of a gas giant.”
Adrian looks across at Victory, but she remains silent.
“They weren’t capable of going into a steep gravity well,” I say, placing my glass back on the table. I want them to think long and hard about this.
“What were these aliens of yours like?” Victory asks.
“Mean,” I say, avoiding any discussion that might focus on their physiology over their nature.
“And their relationship with humanity?” Victory asks, resting her knife and fork on her plate.
“They farmed us,” I say. “Like cattle.”
Adrian’s eyes go wide. Now it’s Victory’s turn to stall for time. She takes a sip of water, delaying her response. She puts down her glass with care, saying, “We have not seen any such behavior.”
“Neither had Gal,” I say, stabbing my fork into a piece of beef. Far from following social norms or etiquette, I slice the beef in a brutish manner, exaggerating the motion of my knife. Once I’ve cut off a piece of meat, I raise it triumphant on my fork, saying, “Delicious!”
“This is different,” Victory says as I chew on my beef.
“Oh, I hope so,” I say with my mouth full. “I really do. Because if it’s not, and they’ve had a quarter of a million years to reach the level of sophistication on display up there, we are well and truly fucked.”
“But the motivation is all wrong,” Adrian says, finally joining the discussion.
“How so?” I ask.
“If they were farming us, why would they revive you? Why bring back someone that knows so much about them?”
To which I say, “Why does a cat play with a mouse?”
“I think Adrian’s right,” Victory says. “We have no reason to believe there’s a link between the aliens you encountered almost twelve light-years from here and the extraterrestrials resurrecting humanity.”
“I died there,” I say a little too emphatically. “Not here. Out there. On Erebus. On one of the moons of Styx, a gas giant in the Procyon Alpha A system. How the hell did I get here?”
“I don’t know,” Victory says. “But it can’t be them. We’ve
seen nothing to suggest our patrons are hostile.”
“They’ve abandoned you,” I say, chewing on another bite of meat.
“They have,” she agrees. “And we need to understand why. That’s why we’re doing all this. That’s why we’re reaching across the void to make contact.”
“You’re assuming they want contact,” I say, “Their silence speaks pretty damn loudly to me. What makes you think they’ll even meet with you? What makes you think they’ll listen?”
Victory swallows a lump in her throat. “We need them to understand.”
I’m quiet. I think they do understand. For whatever reason, they don’t care.
I nod. I get it. This is her life’s work. More than that, she’s convinced everyone else on Earth that their society needs to be geared around this project. Contact is their primary goal—only it’s not First Contact. Not any more. We may not know who these guys are on the Moon, but they know us. There’s no doubt they’ve encountered Homo sapiens before. They’ve invested significant resources of their own to revive our species.
“I hope I’m wrong,” I say, not wanting to press her further.
“I hope so too,” Victory says, reaching over and squeezing my hand affectionately. She smiles. Victory’s a matriarch. She’s got that wholesome grandmother vibe. When I stop and think about what she’s accomplished, it’s quite extraordinary. She’s unified her people in pursuit of a common goal—reaching the Moon.
Victory pats my hand and then returns to her meal. Our conversation’s not over, but the argument is. I get the feeling Victory is used to winning debates. I try to shift the topic.
“How many people are there in this age?” I ask. “I mean, replicating something like Apollo is a massive undertaking.”
“Here on the coast,” she says. “A couple of hundred thousand. Most of our industry is inland. All up, there are about eight million people on New Earth.”
I raise my eyebrows in surprise. The term New Earth gets a smile. I like that. I may have my doubts about what’s happening in this age, having been dropped into the middle of a project that consumes almost every facet of their society, but I appreciate the idea that humanity gets a second chance.
Victory is graceful. The wrinkles below her eyes and out to the side of her lips reveal not only her age but a hard life spent toiling under the sun. Her hair is thin and wispy. The wind must play havoc with her locks, leaving her looking disheveled. Victory looks like an absent-minded, eccentric professor. For her, hair is something to be pushed back and kept out of the way. So long as it’s off her face, she doesn’t care. Her thin arms and petite frame suggest she’s malnourished even though we’re eating healthy food. Perhaps this is a banquet in my honor. Grease stains her dark dress. The sleeves have been rolled up to below her elbows. Her fingernails are short and neatly trimmed. Everything about her is functional rather than aesthetic.
She points at one of the diagrams, shifting the conversation back to less controversial points.
“You’ve seen lots of rockets like this, huh?”
“I’ve launched on rockets like this,” I say. “Well, newer rockets, but the same principle. In my day, we’d use chemical propellant to breach the atmosphere and hit orbit. From there, a fusion/ion drive would take us between planets. We used an experimental displacement drive for interstellar flight.”
Victory takes a bite of sweet potato, saying, “Fascinating. Oh, to have ridden on these fiery chariots into the heavens! What a joy it must be.”
“She could help us,” Adrian says. “She could fly this.”
“Whoa, cowboy,” I say, almost spitting out a bite of pumpkin. I chew and swallow, continuing with, “You don’t fly these things. There’s no joystick. You light them and pray. If the engineers, flight controllers, and programmers have done their jobs, then three minutes later, you’re in orbit. If not, you’ll find your body parts scattered over a hundred square miles of open ocean.”
I take another bite of pumpkin, pointing with my knife at the diagrams and asking, “Where did you get all this?”
“Lots of places,” Victory says. “To our delight, the ancients were interested in reaching out to the future. Our first salvage was from the Mercury monument in Flow-rider. You can’t imagine our delight when we found out the first astronauts were monkeys and chimps.”
I smile. Flow-rider is a rather apt term for Florida.
She says, “I think the engineers in that age knew they’d accomplished something extraordinary. They stored diagrams, blueprints, and training manuals in a time capsule. Then there was the National Archive. Their long-term storage vault was hermetically sealed with argon.”
I’m astonished. “And these things lasted all this time?”
“Not all of them,” she replies. “The blueprints you see here are copies. Some of those documents were so brittle they perished within minutes of being exposed to the air.”
I turn and look at a diagram of an Apollo Command Module on the far wall. On the table below it, I spot some of the machined aluminum parts found on the inside of the hatch. The gears are corroded, having lost their crisp edges, but I recognize them.
“And that?” I say, pointing, “You’ve recovered actual parts?”
“We’ve got an entire orbital stack from Apollo 18, including the LEM.”
“A Lunar Excursion Module?” I say, surprised. “The lanky craft they took down to the Moon? No way!”
“The rubber seals have perished, and the wiring is shot, but yes, we have a LEM.”
“How?” I say, followed by, “Wait, there was no Apollo 18. The last Lunar mission was 17.”
Victory looks across the table at Adrian, saying, “She’s a smart one. Officially, it’s LEM-13. Apollo 17 used LEM-12. This one never flew in space.”
I hope talking while eating isn’t a sin, but I can’t help myself. I’m chewing on some roast beef as I say, “You know you can’t use it, right? It might look sound, but metal fatigue will have weakened it.”
Victory nods, hiding behind a smile.
Adrian says, “It’s allowed us to reverse-engineer the design.”
“How long has it been?” I ask. “I mean, out there, they were telling me it’s been quarter of a million years. But how do you know that? How is that even possible?”
Victory says, “That’s nothing to the universe. Barely the blink of an eye. For us, a thousand years is like an eternity, only it isn’t. Humanity doesn’t even register on the cosmic clock.”
“But two hundred and fifty thousand years?” I say. “That’s geological time.”
“It’s an estimate.”
“Based on what?”
“The star charts from your age. If we compare the position of nearby stars, we can see how much they’ve shifted since your time.”
“How accurate is that?” I ask, raising an eyebrow in surprise.
“It’s not great,” Victory confesses, “But we also have precession as a guide. Earth wobbles as it spins. Precession causes the north pole to point in a different direction in space, looping once every twenty-six thousand years. The position of the celestial north pole shifts over time. It points in different directions as it drifts from Polaris over to Vega and then around through Draco and back to Polaris again.
“Think of the nearby stars like the hour hand on a clock and the position of the north pole like the minute hand. We’re close. We don’t know the exact second, but we’re pretty sure of the general time.”
“Huh,” I reply, nodding in agreement. Damn, right now, I want to walk outside and look up at the constellations. I’m curious to see which of them have roughly the same shape and which are unrecognizable. Who am I kidding? In my day, they were all unrecognizable except for Orion and the Big Dipper.
“And you’re really going to do this?” I ask. “With an agrarian society, you’re going to launch for the Moon. You know that’s crazy, right?”
“Our society is geared toward the Great Leap Forward.”
“
Not a phrase I’d use,” I say, trying not to laugh.
“What?” Victory asks, confused.
“Nothing,” I say, pointing at Adrian. “It’s just—that had a very different connotation in our time.”
“But that’s passed,” Adrian says.
“Oh, I hope so,” I reply. “I really do. Honestly, throughout history, we’ve been our own worst enemy.”
Victory looks a little confused, but she lets that point go.
“We will succeed,” she says with the blind confidence that has been the hallmark of human failure over the centuries. I bite my tongue. I don’t want to be negative. I get what they’re trying to do. And I agree with the importance of what they’re doing. They’re effectively trying to drag themselves up by their bootstraps. It’s human. We can’t help but try. It’s in our nature. I nod, thinking carefully about my next few words. There’s a lot of things I could say, but what’s needed is some gravity.
“Whatever you think you know about Apollo, know this. It was far more complex and difficult than you could ever imagine in your worst-case scenario. If I remember correctly, the first shakeout test of a command module exposed over six hundred errors. Any one of them would have ruined the mission. Every fix introduces the possibility of even more mistakes. It took half a million people from the most advanced industrial nation of its day over a decade to put just twelve men on the Moon.”
Victory has stopped eating. She’s got her elbows on the table and is leaning forward, resting her chin on her clenched hands. She listens intently to what I’m saying. I’m surprised by my recollections. My personal life might be hazy, but my professional memories are intact.
“Space is unforgiving. The temperature extremes alone can warp materials. And space is big. Orbital mechanics make everything more complex. A minor inaccuracy here and you miss going there. In the early years, over half of the missions to Mars failed. They either missed the planet or added to its list of craters. As for the Moon, the first few robotic missions slammed into the damn thing because no one knew how to land.
Déjà Vu (First Contact) Page 20
