Last and First Contacts (Imaginings)

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Hans?’

  Hans, it turned out, is the flight deck’s computing machine. Hans can fly the Beast on ‘his’ own, and even when a human pilot is at the stick he takes over most functions. ‘I think the name is a German joke,’ Jack said. ‘Some translation of “hands off”.’

  I crouched beside his position, looking out over the ocean. ‘What do you think we’re going to find out there, Jack?’

  Jack, matter-of-fact, shrugged. ‘Twelve thousand miles of ocean, and then San Francisco.’

  ‘Then how do you explain the fact that nobody has crossed the Pacific before?’

  ‘Ocean currents,’ he said. ‘Adverse winds. Hell, I don’t know.’

  But we both knew the story is more complicated than that. This is the Pacific Mystery.

  Humanity came out of Africa; Darwin said so. In caveman days we spread north and east, across Asia all the way to Australia. Then the Polynesians went island-hopping. They crossed thousands of miles, reaching as far as Hawaii with their stone axes and dug-out boats.

  But beyond that point the Pacific defeated them.

  And meanwhile others went west, to the Americas. Nobody quite knows how the first ‘native’ Americans got there from Africa; some say it was just accidental rafting on lumber flushed down the Congo, though I fancy there’s a smack of racial prejudice in that theory. So when the Vikings sailed across the north Atlantic they came up against dark-skinned natives, and when the Portuguese and Spanish and British arrived they found a complicated trading economy, half-Norse, half-African, which they proceeded to wipe out.

  Soon the Europeans reached the west coast of the Americas.

  But beyond that point the Pacific defeated them.

  ‘Here’s the puzzle,’ I said to Jack. ‘The Earth is a sphere. You can tell, for instance, by the curving shadow it casts on the moon during a lunar eclipse.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jack. ‘So we know the Pacific can’t be more than twelve thousand miles across.’

  ‘Yes, but western explorers, including Magellan and Captain Cook, have pushed a long way out from the American coast. Thousands of miles. We know they should have found Hawaii, for instance. And from the east, the Chinese in the Middle Ages and the modern Japanese have sailed far beyond the Polynesians’ range. Few came back. Somebody should have made it by now. Jack, the Pacific is too wide. And that is the Mystery.’

  Jack snorted. ‘Bull hockey,’ he said firmly. ‘You’ll be telling me next about sea monsters and cloud demons.’

  But those ancient Pacific legends had not yet been disproved, and I could see that some of the bridge crew, those who could follow our English, were glancing our way uncertainly.

  Day 8. We are out of wireless telegraphy contact; the last of the Japanese stations has faded, and our forest of W/T masts stand purposeless. You can’t help but feel isolated.

  So we three, Ciliax, Jack and I, are drawn to each other, huddling in our metal cave like primitives. This evening we had another stiff dinner, the three of us. Loathing each other, we drink too much, and say too much.

  ‘Of course,’ Ciliax murmured, ‘the flight of a rocket-plane would last only minutes, and would be all but uncontrollable once, ah, the fuse is lit. Somebody on the ground must have known precisely when the Goering would pass overhead. I wonder who could have let them know?’

  If that was a dig at Jack or me, Jack wasn’t having any of it. ‘“Somebody”? Who? In Asia you Nazis are stacking up your enemies, Wolfie. The Bolsheviks, partisans. You and the Japanese will meet and fall on each other some day –’

  ‘Or it may have been Americans,’ Ciliax said smoothly.

  ‘Why would America attack a Nazi asset?’

  ‘Because of the strategic implications of the Goering. Suppose we do succeed in crossing the Pacific? America has long feared the vulnerability of its long western coastline…’

  Jack’s eyes were narrow, but he didn’t bother to deny it.

  In 1940 America was indeed looking over its shoulder nervously at Japan’s aggressive expansion. But the Pacific proved impassable, the Japanese did not come. So, during the Phoney War, America stood firm with Britain. In April 1940 Hitler overran Denmark and Norway, and in May outflanked the Maginot line to crush France. The blitzkriegs caused panic in the British Cabinet. Prime Minister Chamberlain was forced out of office for his poor handling of the war.

  But Hitler paused. The North Sea was his boundary, he said; he wanted no conflict with his ‘Anglo-Saxon cousins’, who stood united against him.

  Churchill was all for rejecting Hitler’s overtures and fighting on. But Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, argued that Hitler’s terms were acceptable. While Churchill retired fuming to the backbenches, the ‘scarecrow in a derby hat’ was Prime Minister within the week, and had agreed an armistice within the month.

  Hitler was able to turn his full energies east, and by Christmas 1941 had taken Moscow.

  All this happened, you see, because the Japanese had not been able to pose a threat to the Americans. If not for the impassibility of the Pacific, America’s attentions might have been drawn to the west, not the east. And without the powerful support we enjoyed from America, if Hitler hadn’t been moved to offer such a generous peace in 1940 – if Hitler had dared attack Britain – the Germans would eventually have found themselves fighting on two fronts, west and east. Could Russia have survived a lesser Nazi assault? Is it even conceivable that Russia and Britain and America could have worked as allies against the Nazis, even against the Japanese? Would the war against the Nazis eventually have been won?

  All this speculation is guff, of course, best left to blokes in pubs. But you can see that if the Pacific had been navigable the whole outcome of the war with the Germans would have been different, one way or another. And that is why the Goering, a plane designed to challenge the ocean’s impregnability, is indeed a weapon of strategic significance.

  This is what we argue about over lunch and dinner. Lost in the vast inhuman arena of this ocean, we are comforted by the familiarity of our petty human squabbles.

  Day 10. Perhaps I should record distances travelled, rather than times.

  It is three days since we left behind the eastern coast of Asia. Over sea, unimpeded by resupplying or bomb-dropping, we make a steady airspeed of two hundred and twenty knots. In the last forty-eight hours alone we should have covered twelve thousand miles.

  We should already have crossed the ocean. We should already be flying over the Americas. When I take astronomical sightings, it is as if we have simply flown around a perfectly behaved spherical Earth from which America has been deleted. The geometry of the sky doesn’t fit the geometry of the Earth.

  Somehow I hadn’t expected the mystery to come upon us so quickly. Only ten days into the flight, we are still jostling for position at the dinner table. And yet we have sailed into a mystery so strange that we may as well have been projected to the moon.

  I still haven’t met the Captain, whose name, I am told, is Fassbender. Even lost as we are in the middle of unfathomable nothingness, the social barriers between us are as rigid as the steel bulkheads of the Beast.

  Day 15. Today, a jaunt in a chariot. What fun!

  We passed over yet another group of islands, this one larger than most, dark basaltic cones blanketed by greenery and lapped by the pale blue of coral reefs. Observers in the blisters, armed with binoculars and telescopes, claimed to see movement at the fringes of these scattered fragments of jungle. So the Captain ordered the chariots to go down and take a shuftie.

  There were four of us in our chariot, myself, Jack, Ciliax, and a crewman who piloted us, a squat young chap called ‘Klaus’ whom I rather like. Both the Germans wore sidearms; Jack and I did not. The chariot is a stubby-winged seaplane, well equipped to land on the back of the Beast; a tough little bugger.

  We skimmed low over clearings where lions ran and immense bears growled. Things like elephants, covered in brown hair and with long curling tusks, lifted their tr
unks as we passed, as if in protest at our engines’ clatter. ‘Christ,’ Jack said. ‘What I wouldn’t give to be down among ‘em with a shotgun.’ Ciliax and I took photographs and cine-films and made notes and spoke commentaries into tape-recorders.

  And we thought we saw signs of people: threads of smoke rose from the beaches.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ Ciliax said. ‘Cave bears. What looked like sabre-tooth cats. Mammoths. This is a fauna that has not been seen in Europe or America since the ice retreated.’

  Jack asked, ‘What happened to ‘em?’

  ‘We hunted them to death,’ I said. ‘Probably.’

  ‘What with, machine guns?’

  I shrugged. ‘Stone axes and flint arrowheads are enough, given time.’

  ‘So,’ Jack asked practically, ‘how did they get here?’

  ‘Sea levels fall and rise,’ Ciliax said. ‘When the ice comes, it locks up the world’s water. Perhaps that is true even of this monstrous world ocean. Perhaps the lower waters expose dry land now submerged, or archipelagos along which one can raft.’

  ‘So in the Ice Age,’ I said, ‘we hunted the mammoths and the giant sloths until we drove them off the continents. But they kept running, and a few of them made it to one island or another, and now they just continue fleeing, heading ever east.’ And in this immense ocean, I thought, there was room to keep running and running and running. Nothing need ever go extinct.

  ‘But there are people here,’ Jack pointed out. ‘We saw fires.’

  We buzzed along the beach. We dipped low over a kind of camp-site, a mean sort of affair centred on a scrappy hearth. The people, naked, came running out of the forest at our noise – and when they saw us, most of them went running back again. But we got a good look at them, and fired off photographs.

  They were people, of a sort. They had fat squat bodies, and big chests, and brows like bags of walnuts. I think it was obvious to us all what they were, even to Jack.

  ‘Neanderthals.’ Ciliax said it first; it is a German name. ‘Another species of – well, animal – which we humans chased out of Africa and Europe and Asia.’

  Jack said, ‘They don’t seem to be smart enough to wipe out the mammoths as we did.’

  ‘Or maybe they’re too smart,’ I murmured.

  Ciliax said, ‘What a remarkable discovery: relics of the evolutionary past, even while the evolutionary future of mankind is being decided in the heart of Asia!’

  Standing orders forbid landings. The chariot lifted us back to the steel safety of the Beast, and that was that.

  It is now eight days since we crossed the coast of China. We have come thirty-five thousand miles since. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to find such strange beasts below, mammoths and cave bears and low-browed savages.

  And still we go on. What next? How thrilling it all is!

  Day 23. Today, a monstrous electrical storm.

  We flew under the worst of it, our banks of engines thrumming, as lightning crackled around the W/T masts. Perhaps in this unending ocean there are unending storms – nobody knows, our meteorologists cannot calculate it.

  But we came out of it. Bold technicians crawled out to the wing roots to check over the Beast, to replace a mast or two, and to tend to the chariots. I wanted to check my Spitfire, but predictably was not allowed by Ciliax. Still, Klaus kindly looked over the old bird for me and assures me she is A-OK.

  Last night both Ciliax and Jack Bovell made passes at me, the one with a steely resolve, the other rather desperately.

  Day 25. A rather momentous day.

  Our nominal food and water store is intended to last fifty days. Today, therefore, Day 25, is the turn-back point. And yet we are no nearer finding land, no nearer penetrating the great mysteries of the Pacific.

  The Captain had us gather in the larger of the restaurants – we being the passengers and senior officers; the scullery maids were not represented, and nor were the helots, the lost souls of the atom-engine compartment. The Captain himself, on his flight deck, spoke to us by speaker tube; I have yet to see his face.

  We discussed whether to continue the mission. We had a briefing by the quartermaster on the state of our supplies, then a debate, followed by a vote. A vote, held on a flying Nazi schlachtschiff! I have no doubt that Captain Fassbender had already made his own decision before we were gathered in the polished oak of the dining room. But he was trying to boost morale – even striving to stave off mutinies in the future. Christopher Columbus used the same tactics, Jack told me, when his crew too felt lost in the midst of another endless ocean.

  And, like Columbus, Captain Fassbender won the day. For now we carry on, on half-rations. The movie-makers filmed it all, even though every last man of them, too fond of their grub, voted to turn back.

  Day 28. Today we passed over yet another group of islands, quite a major cluster. Captain Fassbender ordered a few hours’ orbit while the chariots went down to explore. Of my little group only I bothered to ride down, with my friend Klaus. Jack Bovell did not answer my knock on his cabin door; I have not seen him all day. I suspect he has been drinking heavily.

  So Klaus and I flew low over forests and patches of grassland. We spooked exotic-looking animals: they were like elephants and buffalo and rhinoceroses. Perhaps they are archaic forms from an age even deeper than the era of ice. Living fossils! I snapped pictures merrily and took notes, and fantasised of presenting my observations to the Royal Geographical Society, as Darwin did on returning from his voyage on the Beagle.

  Then I saw people. They were naked, tall, slim, upright. They looked more ‘modern’, if that is the right word, than the lumpy-browed Neanderthals we saw on the islands of mastodons, many days ago. Yet their heads receded from their foreheads; their shapely skulls can contain little in the way of grey matter, and their pretty brown eyes held only bewilderment. They fled from our approach like the other animals of the savannah.

  Primitive they might be, but it appears they lead the march of the hominids, off to the east. I took more photos.

  I have begun to develop a theory about the nature of the world, and the surface of the ocean over which we travel – or rather the geometric continuum in which it seems to be embedded. I think the Pacific is a challenge not merely to the cartographic mind but to the mathematical. (I just read those sentences over – how pompous – once a Girton girl, always a Girton girl!) I’ve yet to talk it over with anybody. Only Wolfgang Ciliax has a hope of understanding me, I think. I prefer to be sure of my ground before I approach him.

  Certainly a radical new theory of this ocean of ours is needed. Think of it! Since the coast of Asia we have already travelled far enough to circle the earth nearly five times, if it were not for this oddity, this Fold in the World.

  The Pacific is defeating us, I think, crushing our minds with its sheer scale. After only three days on half tuck everybody is grumbling as loudly as their bellies. Yet we go on…

  Day 33. It has taken me twenty-four hours to get around to this entry. After the events of yesterday the writing of it seemed futile. Courage, Bliss! However bad things are, one must behave as if they are not so, as my mother, a stoical woman, has always said.

  It began when Jack Bovell, for the third day in a row, did not emerge from his cabin. One cannot have uncontrollable drunks at large on an aircraft, not even one as large as this. And no part of the Goering, not even passengers’ cabins, can be off-limits to the god-like surveillance of the Captain. So Wolfgang Ciliax led a party of hefty aircrew to Jack’s cabin. I went along at Ciliax’s request, as the nearest thing to a friend Jack has on this crate.

  I watched as the Germans broke down Jack’s door. Jack was drunk, but coherent, and belligerent. He took on the Luftwaffe toughs, and as he was held back Ciliax ordered a thorough search of his cabin – ‘thorough’ meaning the furniture was dismantled and the false ceiling broken into.

  The flap that followed moved fast. I have since pieced it together.

  The airmen found a small radio tr
ansceiver, a compact leather case full of valves and wiring. This, it turned out, had been used by Jack to attract the attention of that rocket-plane as we flew over the Ukraine. So Ciliax’s suspicions were proven correct. I am subtly disappointed in Jack; it seems such an obvious thing to have done. Anyhow, this discovery led to a lot of shouting, and the thugs moved in on Jack. But as they did so he raised his right hand, which held what I thought at first was a grenade, and the thugs backed off.

  Ciliax turned to me, his face like a thunderous sky. ‘Talk to this fool or he’ll kill us all.’

  Jack huddled in the corner of his smashed-up room, his face bleeding, his gadget in his upraised right hand. ‘Bliss,’ he panted. ‘I’m sorry you got dragged into this.’

  ‘I was in it from the moment I stepped aboard. If you sober up – Wolfgang could fetch you some coffee –’

  ‘Adrenaline and a beating-up are great hangover cures.’

  ‘Then think about what you’re doing. If you set that thing off, whatever it is, do you expect to survive?’

  ‘I didn’t expect to survive when I called up that Russkie rocket-plane. But it isn’t about me, Bliss. It’s about duty.’

  Ciliax sneered. ‘Your President must be desperate if his only way of striking at the Reich is through suicide attacks.’

  ‘This has nothing to do with Truman or his administration,’ Jack said. ‘If he’s ever challenged about it he’ll deny any knowledge of this, and he’ll be telling the truth.’

  Ciliax wasn’t impressed. ‘Plausible deniability. I thought that was an SS invention.’

  ‘Tell me why, Jack,’ I pressed him.

  He eyed me. ‘Can’t you see it? Ciliax said it himself. It’s all about global strategies, Bliss. If the Pacific crossing is completed the Germans will be able to strike at us. And that’s what I’ve got to put a stop to.’

  ‘But there will be other Goerings,’ Ciliax said.

  ‘Yeah, but at least I’ll buy some time, if it ends here – if nobody knows – if the Mystery remains, a little longer. Somebody has to take down this damn Beast. A rocket-plane didn’t do it. But I’m Jonah, swallowed by the whale.’ He laughed, and I saw he was still drunk after all.