by L. S. Wood
The space station passed from the light side of the Earth around to its dark side. The millions of flickering night lights around the big cities and many small towns around the globe were silent, and not lit up to take away the darkness. Not one flicker of a single lamp could be seen anywhere below lighting up the tall buildings now in total darkness.
The space crews could see absolutely nothing but the pitch black of night, except for an occasional campfire ablaze, lit by someone living in the backcountry to keep he, or she warm and to cook their meals upon the commander assumed.
It turned out to be an overpoweringly ghastly sight in dismay for everyone who looked down through the telescope.
To observe their world below, that once shown bright with its many bright lights glittering up the darkness of night showing off big city after big city, and small town, after small town. The once brilliant lights of the night on earth were now down to just a few measly scattered campers’ fires, flaming aglow in the darkness, separated by miles away from each other.
The sudden instant effects the neutron bombs had on earth, did not affect anything above the earth’s Ionosphere, for the vast cavity, the void of space protected the crews of the Twitchel, along with the crew of the International Space Station. The void they were in protected them from experiencing any of the ill-fated effects the invasive neutrons had had on the planet Earth at the time of the explosion.
The once pure aqua blue atmosphere surrounding the earth with its clean clear looking color of purity, now looked more a dirty rusty wishy-washy looking brownish aqua blue, than the purity it once shown.
Dumbfounded, the stranded astronauts did not quite know what to think about what they were observing below. Everything aboard the space station seemed to be working quite well, but the earth below seemed to be a powerless space ball floating helplessly in space without electricity to bring its dark nights back aglow. There were no signs of streetlights, neon signs, or sporting arena lights of any kind, that once lit up the dark night skies to be found anywhere around the globe. The lack of electricity on earth was the strangest of all occurrences to them, so they thought.
One would think there should be at least one single bright shining streetlight somewhere around the earth, on at least one of the many continents, but there was not even one single aglow of an electric bulb anywhere below that they could see. What could have been so drastic to eliminate all the electricity-producing qualities of the earth? The thought of it behooved those trapped in space. None could imagine such a thing’
The space travelers were amiss, thinking and hoping the world would be as it had always been before when the orange mist dissipated, but it was not. They continued observing the newly changed Earth, while they passed innocently overhead, everyone knowing the Earth they once knew as home, had gone through a living hell of an immense disaster.
Their planet had gone from being a bright pretty aqua soothing blue colored ball in space to a now brownish looking worthless dirty sheen ridden ball of light dirty orange and a poor blue in color.
The astronauts wondered if planet Earth had lost all of its life supporting systems of oxygen producing life of plants as well, at the time of the explosion below the cloud cover. They also wondered if anyone below the orange sheen could survive the deadly looking gasses it looked to produce when the blast occur if all were dead or possibly some had survived.
Passing above continent after continent as the time of day changed around the world, they could see the world had gone through a hellish nightmare.
There definitely were fewer living humans, animals, or foul of the air living on earth or flying in its skies than there had been before the great catastrophe took place.
There were thousands upon thousands of idle cars, trucks, planes, and trains sitting motionlessly dead idle where they must have been when the big bang happened.
In every country they were able to look down into, they could see commercial aircraft crash scenes scattered everywhere around the global airports of the world.
In cities, towns, and rural suburbia alike, they could see the dead bodies of men, women, children, animals, and foul of the air scattered about the countryside, littering the ground like dead locus after a heavy frost.
Every country the space station passed overhead had been affected one way or another from the big blast that had changed the world they once knew forever. They witnessed some people moving around, and it brought to them a little ray of hope.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Gruesome Sight
The efforts by the ones left alive below, were busy covering and burying up the many dead bodies of humans and creatures scattered around the open land. The stench of death on earth must have been truly great on the select few doing this type of gruesome work trying to protect the world from an outbreak of disease the world had never seen before caused by so many decaying carcasses of animals, and creatures of the once thriving animal kingdom around planet Earth.
It became even more than strange to the space capsule crew no one from planet Earth had tried to reach them in the last few weeks. Everything still looked intact around the many compounds of space-agency observatories all around the globe the eye in the sky could see from the telescopes operator’s position in the space station. Kazakhstan rocket facilities in Russia looked secure with a space rocket on its launching pad looking ready for flight, with no one moving around the grounds at the site.
It was different at Cape Canaveral in Florida, where there were many people busily moving around the facilities. Still, there was no communications from them to their NASA friends in space. It was as if everyone down below had forgotten all about the ones lost in space floating around helplessly, not knowing what to do next.
They did, however, observe a very limited number of vehicles starting to move to, and fro over the roadways around the earth, after several long weeks of observing none moving around at all. These few vehicles moving on the many deserted highways were a limited number in freight trucks and cars, and a tractor or two busy out in some farmer’s fields.
It seemed very strange seeing so few vehicles in motion around the globe, with so many more of them all sitting idle where they initially stopped, dotting the roadways around the Earth as litter thrown away.
Strange things were taking shape on Earth no one onboard the space station could fathom in one’s mind what it was, especially way out there without any transmitted information from below broadcast to them in order to make any sense out of what was really taking place on the planet.
Weeks living in space seemed to pass ever so slowly for most all astronauts held captive there by their own desire to stay alive and live until whenever they could or could not return back home.
The two Germans and the many Russian crew of the space station with the crew of the U. S. Twitchel had no place pressing to go too. Most all the astronauts were there of their own free will and accord. Willing to go there when each volunteered for the space duty presented them for their new assignment aboard the space station, except for the Americans. The American astronauts were the ones trapped in space as prisoners not of their own free will and accord for the next year or more, whether they wanted to be or not. If things did not improve below, they may find themselves never able to returns back home, and become a space casualty caused by the neutron mishap along with everyone else. If things below did not improve or radio contact reconnected to the ones in charge of their recovery, they might be doomed anyway.
The situation on the space station was somber least for the ones who thought about home all the while. Everyone onboard the space station knew the day of reckoning would probably come sooner than later and much sooner than they all wanted it to come. When the end of life might come to them aboard the Space station when their precious food and other supplies would run out for them.
The long passing days on the space station, turned into weeks, and they int
o months, as time passed ever so slowly for the crews of astronauts. The six-member crew from the Twitchel, pitched in to help do whatever they could do in helping the Soviet Cosmonauts, and two Germans aboard the space station in completing their assigned responsibilities, in setting up their many experiments into completion.
The space travelers aboard the space station all took turns in keeping a watchful eye on the inhabitants of the earth below. Many keeping a constant vigil with earphones attached to ones ear in hopes of possibly hearing the tiniest on radio voices sending out a message to them. Hoping some caring individual back home on earth might really try to contact them, but no sound of anything ever came to them. It mostly worried everyone for there were no music stations playing anywhere on any frequency playing songs any more that they use to like to listen to, to make the time aboard the laboratory pass more smoothly, and wake them up in the morning to cheerful sounds. Now everything was deaf-still to the eardrums except for their own conversations of what might be happening down below on Earth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Eyes toward the Heavens
Many a caring inhabitant left alive on earth, sat out at night on their front piazzas around their homes with eyes glued towards the heavens above.
Some were hopefully looking and watching for the brightness from the bright beacons shining above them from the still electrified space station with its many bright blinking lights to pass overhead in the southern most skies of the United States.
Lieutenant Ann’s family looked night after night for a glimpse of the space station to pass overhead along with the many smaller satellites aloft giving off any electrical illumination at all.
Stargazing youngsters and oldsters alike daydreaming nightly, wishing they had been among the fortunate lucky ones privileged to having been living aboard the space station in space when all hell broke loose on Planet Earth below.
If only the movie Star Trek was a true to life adventure. Then Dr. Spock and his faithful crew aboard the Enterprise would be able to come to the rescue of the citizens living on planet Earth now, and all would become well and better off for everyone. They would be able to right the many wrongs the greedy dead Russian leaders had caused to happen and repair the Earth back to normalcy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A Prayer for a Daughter, a Mother, a Wife
There was one particular family living in upstate Vermont who had great concerns for one of the many astronauts living aboard the space station they hoped with all their heart.
Her husband Ben, her two children Sarah and Amber, along with her mother and father, praying his wife, their mother, and their daughter was safe and well living onboard the International Space Station above them in space.
They all prayed for her nightly and for the others up there as well that they would not be lost forever in space drifting around the planet dead, and entombed forever in a crippled space shuttle having been doomed to a horrid fate of death, as so many others on earth had become victim to. A misfortune caused by selfish power seeking fools who themselves had destroyed each other and their own families in their quest for greed, wealth, and power.
Over time and months, more vehicles began to appear on the many roadways below. They began moving one here and there over the vast highways around earth. The abandoned cars, busses, and trucks sitting abandoned aside the roadways were being pushed aside to make room for the few trucks, busses, and cars that were starting to frequent the roadways more often. Time looked to be marching slowly forward for the ones below. Everything on Earth looked to be getting back to normalcy, more now than before at the onset of the unfortunate mishap. Whatever normalcy was now?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Decaying Death March
With shovels in hand, along with picks, hoes and whatever else one might find for useful tools for digging. People in large groups around the world started burying the countless hundreds and thousands of dead bodies of people and their dead slaughtered animals lying dead all over the earth, along with the millions in dead carcasses of the thousands of many different species in wild animals and birds alike. Some very lucky individuals were able to use backhoes and bulldozers to do their sickly jobs more quickly.
Only a certain few strong willed individuals aboard the space station had strong enough stomachs to withstand the surveillance of the ones burying so many unsightly individuals using the eye in the sky telescope to watch, and see this unnecessary necessity, taking place below.
Commander Anderson having a strong stomach, witnessed many bloated, some exploded bodies of men, woman, and children from the fermentation of their innards sticking of them, and sick looking carcasses of animals alike spewing out their guts from the hot sun of the day, in different location they were found around the globe.
It appeared there was more damage done in some countries more than in others. Australia and Russia looked to have taken the brunt of the many missile blasts, while other countries around the planet had some direct hits of the neutron bombs in scattered places near cities, and larger towns, but not so out in the countryside. Most backland in high places around the planet paid the price of the many wild neutrons spreading out over the land causing death to many creatures and simplicity to some minds leaving adult humans and animals like with the thinking ability of a three or four-year-old child.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Light of Night
Streetlights around the planet began to appear below in the dark of night illuminating a few dark streets and alleyways in cities and towns around the globe. A number of vehicles began appearing on roadways at night, running around with headlamps affixed to them, shinning bright as they drove along the roadways as they had before. The astronauts above thought it a wonderful thing the world was getting back to normal as they gazed down from their captive prison in space. Everything was more as it was before, getting back to normalcy once again, until they zoomed in with their high-powered telescope onto one of the vehicles headlamps on a vehicle moving along a dark roadway in the night.
They observed the vehicles headlamps were not an electrically operated headlamp at all. They were both kerosene oil fired style lanterns taken out of retirement from years past, with reflective mirrored crystals affixed to them for better illumination of the roadways in front of the vehicles for night travel.
Many of the new streetlights around the world were the old style oil wicker burning lamps or piped in gas-fired lanterns illuminating a vast amount of buildings and streets below. The old ways of illuminating the night appeared to be coming back improving the quality of life below, but was it really getting better for its inhabitants. Were all these new improvements a necessity in the times at hand, for electricity looked to be a pleasure from their past.
The many crewmembers aboard the space station began to wonder what had happened to all the electrical producing power-generating plants around the earth. The Hoover Dam along with all the other power-producing damns around the world were still left intact, but there seemed to be no power being produced from any of them.
It behooved the ones in space why none of the generating plants on earth were incapable of producing the lifeline of electricity the people on earth had become so accustomed and dependent on.
Were all these people who knew anything about electricity or how to produce its great power by using these huge generating power plants all killed in the initial big bang, or were the power producing generating plants all internally destroyed somehow by the initial blast?
The situation in darkness surrounding the globe behooved the people of the earth even more than it did the ones who were living in outer space. The electrical engineers of huge power plants had no power even when the generators they were tending too were turning at their fullest high speeds.
The unfortunate thing about all these generating plants around earth was, when someone attempted firing up any water turbine never or used to generate elec
tricity, a huge electrical absorbing force in an orange sheen would appear.
The devil in the sky “the creature” as it had become known would come shooting out of the air from nowhere and snuff out the lives of those whoever they were who were attempting to produce the forbidden force of electrical power the monster above hated.
For some strange reason, a sudden surge of electrical power would summons large numbers of wild powerful neutrons from out of nowhere, and cause the sudden neutralization of all electrical impulses around the area, including the small electrically generated impulses of the human brain and nervous system.
The earth’s population began calling this opposing force of electrical power in the air and sky above “THE THING, THE EVIL NEUTRON CREATURE FROM OUT OF THE AIR AND ABOVE”.
It became ever more frightening to the cosmonauts and astronauts living onboard the space station as to what was really occurring on their homeland sphere below. The world they once knew had drastically changed for them all in only a matter of seconds that dreadful day almost a year ago now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A Long Hard Year
There had been no radio communications from their homeland or from anyone on Earth for almost an entire year now. The life supporting supplies stored in the space station lockers was quickly being used up and dwindling away because of the extra load of six extra mouths to feed from having the Twitchel’s crew aboard using up the limited oxygen supply everyone was so quickly using up in record numbers as time quickly passed away.
