Last and First Contacts (Imaginings)

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘And the weapons designers imagine how it would be –’

  ‘If such a thing were mounted on the tip of an A4, yes.’

  He held her arm. ‘Stand back.’

  A convoy of trucks rolled across the open space before them, heading for a barrier set in the brand new fence around Hall F 1. There the trucks had to queue, engines running, while papers were shown and orders discussed. Dorothea and the priest were held up.

  Dorothea found herself standing beside one of the trucks. It was like a truck for transporting cattle or sheep, a dirty, smelly thing with wooden slats enclosing its bed. But in that space were crammed humans, not animals. They were all men as far as she could see, all wearing what looked like grimy striped pyjamas. They were all standing; in fact there was no room for them to sit. To Dorothea they looked like old men, gaunt, many hairless, even toothless.

  But then one of them spoke to her. ‘Hello, lady.’ He smiled a gappy smile. She saw that he wasn’t old at all. He was pressed against the wooden slats, holding on with thin fingers. He was distinguished from the others by a red triangle sewn to his striped shirt.

  ‘Don’t speak to him,’ Kopleck murmured.

  ‘You are prettier than these uncouth fellows I must travel with. My name is Dirk. I am a Dutch fellow.’ His German was heavily accented.

  The other men in the truck were watching, wide-eyed.

  She found herself saying, ‘My name is Dorothea.’

  ‘Dorothea! Pretty name. Where from, Dorothea?’

  ‘Munich.’

  ‘Pretty place. Me, I came from Buchenwald most recently. You heard of Buchenwald? Before that from Nijmegen. You heard of Nijmegen?’

  ‘I noticed your red triangle.’

  He smiled. ‘Oh, this old thing? Means I was in the resistance.’

  ‘Hey! You!’ An SS man came running up, rifle in hand. ‘Shut up!’ He slammed the butt of his rifle against the slats, into Dirk’s fingers. Dirk fell back with a howl of agony, into the darkness of the truck.

  Kopleck was already marching Dorothea away.

  The RAF bombers came on the night of 17th August.

  The sirens sounded at midnight. The Lancasters and Halifaxes came in over the sea, so there was very little warning, and there was only perfunctory resistance from German planes and anti-aircraft fire.

  The girls from Dorothea’s dormitory scrambled out of the building, bundled in dressing gowns and coats. The sky was clear, the moon full. Led by wardens wielding blue torches, the girls made for their assigned bunkers, talking loudly, nervously.

  But Dorothea broke away and ran for Production Hall F 1. She knew that Adam was on duty on the fence there tonight. She had barely seen him for months. She still had not told him her own deep secret; she’d not had the chance. Soon it would be obvious to everybody, of course. But if this was to be their last night on Earth, she wanted him to know that he was, or would have been, a father.

  She found him at the F 1 fence. The big gate was open, and officers and other ranks were fleeing for the bunkers. When he saw her he grabbed her arm. ‘What are you doing here?’ His voice was all but drowned by the sirens.

  ‘I had to see you. We have to talk.’

  ‘What, now?’

  There was a shuddering thump, deep and visceral. They both staggered.

  She looked up. She could see the RAF planes now, like moths, black against a moonlit sky. There must have been hundreds of them. They were dropping flares, red, white, green, brilliant pinpricks that trailed smoke as they fell.

  ‘This is just the first wave,’ Adam muttered. ‘The next will use the flares and the lights of the fires for positioning.’

  ‘We have to get to the bunkers.’

  ‘No. Too late. The factory,’ he said, making a quick decision. ‘The basements are strong. Come on.’ He grabbed her arm and they ran through the gate in the fence into the Hall compound, and through big access doors into the factory itself.

  Inside, the overhead fluorescent lamps were going out one by one as somebody belatedly turned out the lights. Dorothea gazed around in wonderment. She had never been in here before. This was a pilot production line for making missiles, and she saw forges, welding facilities, lathes, drills, and heaps of components, hull sections, nose cones, tail fins; half-completed rockets lay on great flatbed trailers, some already painted with the camouflage colours they would need when launched by squads of technicians from hiding places in the forests of the Netherlands. All this glimpsed in flashes and shadows as the lights flickered and died, and people ran everywhere, prisoners or guards she couldn’t distinguish, crowding around staircases to the basement.

  And she saw a man in a striped uniform, hanged, dangling from a crane.

  More bombs crashed. Dorothea could hear glass smash, feel the thick-laid concrete floor shudder.

  A man hobbled up to them, grinning, in a striped prisoner’s uniform with a red triangle sewn to the breast.

  Adam drew his revolver. ‘Get back!’

  ‘No!’ Dorothea grabbed his arm. ‘I know him.’

  ‘Hello, Dorothea,’ said Dirk. ‘Follow me. Come, come.’ And he ran off into the dark.

  With difficulty they followed him across the crowded hall. Now all the lights were gone, and the only illumination was the moonlight shafting through broken windows. Dirk led them to a stairwell, leading down into the dark. He took the steps two, three at a time on his impossibly scrawny legs. Dorothea and Adam followed as best they could, Adam keeping his revolver drawn, held like a wand before him. Dirk’s feet were bare, Dorothea saw, his soles bloody and scarred.

  At the base of the stairs was a short corridor, plaster-walled. Again Dirk led the way, running. Still the building shuddered from the approaching bombs.

  They had to squeeze against a wall to get past what Dorothea thought was a pile of blankets, stacked up in the corridor. She found they were bodies, skin and bone, heaped up like firewood. Adam pushed her onwards.

  They reached a doorway and tumbled after Dirk into a wide hall, lit by dangling bulbs. This was a kind of dormitory, with bunks like shelves stacked up four deep. There were prisoners jammed in here, every way Dorothea looked. They cowered back at the sight of the SS man with his revolver. The stink was astounding, a smell of rot.

  Dorothea wondered if Father Kopleck was safe, wherever he was – if indeed he was still alive. The SS had come for him a week earlier.

  ‘Here, here.’ Dirk led them to a bottom-shelf bunk. It was just a wooden frame, Dorothea saw, no mattress, no bedding. Here they sat, the three of them, side by side, Dorothea between the two men. In the shadows around them the prisoners moved with rustles of dry flesh. ‘Safe here,’ said Dirk. ‘Not so bad. Like student dorms. You missed dinner. Cabbage soup.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Adam said routinely.

  Dirk looked away. Dorothea saw he had one hand swathed in a filthy bandage.

  More bombs fell like monstrous footsteps, and the building shook, the frame of the bed, and plaster fell from the ceiling.

  Dorothea felt oppressed by the huge inhuman energies being unleashed all around her. ‘The prisoners will be killed too,’ she said with a stab of outrage. ‘Don’t the English know that?’

  Adam grimaced. ‘Serve the little bastards right. Have you heard of their sabotage? They piss on the electronics. Over-tighten screws. Even blow dust into links between the turbo pumps. Stuff that’s impossible to detect before you fly. A rocket is a finely tuned machine; it isn’t hard to foul it up. And they keep on doing it, no matter how many of them we string up. Eh? Eh, you little bastard?’ He jabbed Dirk in the ribs with the muzzle of his revolver. ‘Keep this up and it’ll be the ovens for the whole damn lot of you.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll hit the comet?’

  ‘It’s possible. They won’t be aiming for it but some bombs always go astray, or are simply dumped. If they hit it we’ll lose everything. Oh, not the A4. That project will recover. There’s already been talk of moving from here, now that the
location is compromised. Von Braun is all for live launches, I mean with munitions, in the middle of Poland.’

  She frowned. ‘But there are people there.’

  ‘Only Poles. Or we might build a plant under a mountain. Von Braun has marvellous dreams, you know. Such as putting one A4 on top of another and building a rocket that could reach New York. How would Roosevelt like that, eh? But he’s been fired up by what we could do with the comet technology.’

  ‘Make even bigger bombs.’

  ‘Yes, but beyond that… Think about it, Dorothea. You believe the Alpha Centauri people wanted to send us a message. Well, they have. And that message is – we can reach you! And with ships like this, we can destroy you! For they could, you know. Von Braun and Dornberger did some calculations of the energy, I mean the sheer kinetic energy, that would be locked up in a craft of a few tons travelling at half the speed of light. Why, you wouldn’t need munitions; an impact alone could sterilise a whole planet. So that’s von Braun’s dream. After this war is won, and the next with the Japanese.’

  ‘A dream to do what?’

  ‘Why, to build a bigger and better comet, and fire it back at Alpha Centauri. Do to them what they should have done to us, before they missed their chance – and gave us the technology to strike back at them. What an error that was! War is inevitable, between worlds as between nations. We must strike first. Why take a chance?’

  Perhaps their baby, she thought, of which Adam was still entirely unaware, would live to see that war. The first interstellar war.

  ‘Those damn English. One bomb landing in the wrong place tonight – why, the destiny of worlds hangs in the balance, my love. In the very balance…’

  She held his hand, and on her other side Dirk’s, as the English bombs stomped across Peenemünde, coming ever closer.

  In The Abyss of Time

  St John Elstead’s cosmological time machine was a hole in the ground.

  I was choppered in from LA. We flew maybe sixty kilometres north, skimmed across the Mojave, and descended close to the town of Edwards. From the air Elstead’s facility was a ring of blocky white buildings that might have spanned a couple of kilometres, set out over the desert. The hub of the facility was a huddle of buildings at the rim of the circle towards the south west, like a diamond on a wedding ring.

  We landed on a helipad, an uncompromising square of black tarmac. A gaggle of technicians in orange jumpsuits, some of them carrying lightweight cameras and sound gear, stood at the edge of the pad. I climbed down with my backpack. This was the Mojave, in July. I had just flown out from a rainy London, and jet lag and furnace heat made me reel.

  A tall, spare figure came striding towards me, smiling. He wore a jumpsuit like the rest, with a nametag on his chest and some kind of mission patch on his arm. His coiffure was expensive, his skin toned, and though I knew he was in his fifties he had the easy physical grace of a man with the time to play squash.

  He grabbed my hand. ‘Ms Oram. Susie?’

  ‘Yes –’

  ‘Glad you could make it. You know who I am.’

  What arrogance! But as Time’s Man of the Year of the previous year, 2023, St John Elstead, founder and life president of Cristal Industries, was unmistakeable. I was tempted to mispronounce his name – ‘Saint John’ rather than the correct ‘Sin-junn’ – but that would have been petty.

  He turned on his heel and marched back to his technicians. I hurried to follow, my pack heavy on my sweating back. Over his shoulder he asked me, ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

  ‘Because you’re paying me half a million euros.’

  He laughed. ‘Fair enough. But you don’t know anything else? And it doesn’t bother you?’

  I decided to be blunt. ‘I’m just back from covering the efforts of Christian peacekeepers to broker an armistice in the Iraqi civil war. Writing up some businessman’s latest vanity project does not frighten me, no.’

  He glanced at me. ‘A bit of spirit. That’s what I detected in your work for the Guardian.’ His accent was the strangulated Bostonian familiar from a hundred ads and a dozen high-profile self-publicising stunts: ballooning, swimming with the sharks, a circumlunar jaunt on a rented Soyuz. ‘Full briefing later. But for now, two words: cosmological exploration.’ He grinned, but it meant nothing to me.

  The technicians stood around a hole in the ground. It was maybe a metre across and covered by a heavy metal hatch, like a submarine’s. As we walked up two heavy-set techs turned the hatch’s wheel and hauled it open. A shaft led into the ground, filled with a silvery light, and I felt an unaccountable thrill.

  ‘Down we go,’ Elstead said to me.

  ‘Now? Just like that?’

  He shrugged. ‘We’re ready to go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘We’ve just been waiting for you. There’s nothing to be gained by delaying. And besides, it’s air-conditioned down there. You first. Look, there are rungs inset into the wall of the shaft.’

  The shaft was generously wide, plenty of room for me and my pack, and maybe three metres deep, an easy climb down. At the bottom I stood with Elstead and looked up at a circle of washed-out Mojave sky, and sweating, silhouetted faces. When the hatch closed over it was like an eclipse of the sun.

  Elstead watched me. ‘I hope you’re not claustrophobic.’

  ‘It’s just that things are moving a little rapidly.’

  ‘That’s how I like it. This way.’

  We were off again. He led me through a door, a big oval metal affair opened by spinning a wheel, then along another short passageway, brightly lit. The air was fresh and cool, but it smelled faintly metallic; obviously we were in a sealed system. It was like a nuclear bunker. And there were oddities: Velcro pads on the walls, bright colour schemes with floors and ceilings clearly distinguished from walls, even doors that looked as if they had been fitted sideways.

  We reached a small cabin, and Elstead gave me some privacy for a few minutes. It wasn’t much more than a pod-hotel room in Tokyo, but it had a softscreen, its own tiny bathroom facilities, and even a little coffee machine. The bunk had seatbelt-like straps over it, oddly.

  A single jumpsuit hung on a peg. It had a nametag stitched onto it – ORAM – and a mission patch, like an astronaut’s, which showed a kind of funnel shape like a cartoon black hole, and a slogan: SPACETIME BATHYSCAPHE I. How cheesy, I thought. I did wonder, though, what kind of bathyscaphe could be buried in the Mojave.

  I used the facilities quickly, trying to wash off the grit of a transatlantic flight and to wake myself up. The jumpsuit was a perfect fit. I left my London clothes in a locker.

  Elstead had waited for me outside. ‘The suit is okay? It’s smart fabric, self-cleaning, temperature control.’

  It was cool and snug, and moved with me as I walked. ‘I want one.’

  He laughed. ‘Keep it.’

  Through another hatch in the floor we descended to a lower level, and came to a larger chamber, which Elstead called the bridge. It was a roughly cylindrical space, with its curving walls, floor and even the ceiling coated with softscreens. Right now these were full of readouts, graphical and digital. Three couches, like heavy-built airline seats with harnesses, were suspended in the centre of the room. You reached them by crossing a catwalk of white-painted metal. The couches had trays laden with more softscreens that you could pull into your lap.

  The central couch was already occupied, by a thin, intent-looking man of around forty. He was busy, peering at the wall displays, working at his lap tray. When we walked in he started to get up, but Elstead waved him back. ‘That’s Teutonic manners for you, but the three of us are going to be working together for the next few days, and I don’t think we need stand on ceremony.’

  The man shook my hand. ‘My name is Walter Junge.’ Vall-tair. His accent was clipped, precise; I thought he was Prussian.

  Elstead clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Walter is my evil genius – my Igor. All this, the Bathyscaphe and the facility that sustains
it, is his design.’

  Junge nodded. ‘But your vision, Elstead.’

  Elstead laughed. ‘And my money. Not the first time American money and German know-how have combined to make history, eh, Susie? So our motley crew is assembled. Sit down, Susie – your seat is the right-hand one. Strap in tight.’

  The buckles were straightforward. As I strapped in Junge continued to work, and a low hum filled our spherical chamber. I sensed huge energies gathering. The proceedings had the atmosphere of a space launch; I had a fantasy of this whole facility bursting out of the ground like a Minuteman missile from its silo. The preparations for this event must have been going on for hours; it was a showman’s touch to have me landed and thrown down here at the crucial moment.

  It was all as corny as hell, and I still didn’t know what was going on. But again, I couldn’t help feeling thrilled.

  Elstead smiled at me. ‘Susie, a favour. Do you have a pendant? A locket, maybe …’

  I had a small crucifix on a gold chain, a gift from my mother when I was five; I’d worn it ever since.

  ‘Would you mind taking it off, and hanging it from your monitor tray?’

  I shrugged and complied. The little trinket dangled, glittering in LED light. ‘I still don’t have the faintest idea what we’re all doing here.’

  ‘You’ll find out in five minutes,’ Elstead said.

  ‘Actually a little more than three,’ Junge said. ‘The five-minute count started when you closed the door to the bridge.’

  ‘Three, then. I did give you a clue, Susie –’

  ‘Cosmological exploration. That means nothing to me.’ I remembered old Discovery Channel shows about giant orbital telescopes peering into space. Cosmology was a matter of observing; its subject was the universe, its theories concerned the ancient past and deep future. How could you explore it?

  But I had picked up other clues. ‘We’re in the Mojave. Close to Edwards Air Force Base? A good place to be if you want isolation, but with access to technicians from LA, and maybe help from the Air Force with heavy lifting.’ I thought about that circle of blockhouses, spread over kilometres. ‘Have you built a particle accelerator out here, Mr Elstead?’