9781629270050-Text-for-ePub-rev

by Unknown

  Late afternoon, they crossed the border into England. Tom commented on this to Ceri, but again only received a grunt in response. The woman had withdrawn into herself and Tom didn’t know what to do to bring her back to the surface. Not that he spent much time worrying about it. His own thoughts had turned dark once more as he pondered how best to force Peter to tell them what he knew. On more than one occasion, Tom’s thoughts strayed to the boxes and bottles of pills in the suitcase in the boot.

  As the temperature dipped below freezing and night fell, they left the main road and drove down a lane to a quaint village. Peter pulled up in front of a large pub that looked hundreds of years old. Tom parked the Jaguar behind the Range Rover and got out, whistling to Dusty. His breath plumed and he wrapped his arms about himself.

  “Bloody parky now,” he said.

  “Yep,” agreed Peter. “It’s going to snow tonight. But we should be snug in here.”

  Peter tried the pub door. It was locked.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll see if I can find a back entrance.”

  Tom waited, stamping his feet and bending occasionally to stroke Dusty as he bounded up to him before scampering away again, excited to be outdoors. Ceri had just decided to leave the warmth of the Jaguar and join him when there came the sound of bolts being withdrawn and the pub door was thrown open.

  “Welcome to The Barrel and Bell,” Peter said with a grin.

  They all went in, Tom calling Dusty to join them. Peter held a torch, which revealed tables of dark wood and red-cushioned benches. Overlying the faint smell of yeast was another, smoky smell that Ceri recognised before he did.

  “They’ve got a fireplace,” she said.

  Peter’s torch beam picked out the huge stone chimney breast and grate. Neatly stacked alongside it was a bundle of split logs.

  “I reckon,” said Peter, “that this place was closed up at the outbreak of the plague. I had a peek behind the bar. It’s fully stocked. The beer in the pumps will have gone off, but there’s loads of canned and bottled drinks. And a ton of crisps and snacky shit.” He flicked the light beam towards a door at one end of the bar. “I opened that—it leads to the living quarters. Best keep it closed. A little, er, aromatic.”

  Ceri grimaced, but Tom found that the thought of spending the night beneath a rotting corpse or two no longer filled him with distaste.

  They hunted around. In the cellar, they found crates of bottles of cola, lemonade, beer, cider, orange juice, spring water, soda water . . . Boxes of crisps, pork scratchings, salted peanuts, roasted peanuts, cashew nuts . . . In the kitchen they found catering-sized jars and tins of food.

  Peter exclaimed with delight as he opened a cupboard in the corner of the kitchen.

  “Paraffin lamps! Six of them. Trimmed and filled. They must be used to power cuts around here cos they’re well prepared.”

  Within the hour, the three people and one dog lounged on cushioned benches drawn up before a crackling log fire, coats and boots discarded, munching on flame-toasted hot dog sausages, crisps and pickled eggs. Dusty wolfed down a couple of sausages and a large tin of ham, lapping water from a giant ashtray Tom found behind the bar. Tom washed his food down with a bottle of Australian lager; he carried a few more bottles outside and left them to chill. Peter drank a can of cola. Ceri had taken a bottle of vodka from behind the bar and sloshed it into a glass with orange juice.

  Tom watched her surreptitiously for a while in the flickering light of the paraffin lamps. She gulped down the first few mouthfuls and coughed. Then she gulped down some more and refilled the glass. It was her business if she wanted to get drunk, but Tom wanted her to wait until he had tackled Peter in case he needed her support. He started to plan what he could say to her when he realised that he wouldn’t need to say anything. Ceri only took small and occasional sips of the second drink as though some desire or need had been satisfied by the first.

  He turned his attention instead to Peter and was just about to embark on his opening gambit when Ceri beat him to it.

  “Tell us about earlier,” she said softly. “What you showed us. Tell us.”

  Peter glanced at Tom who nodded emphatically.

  Peter sighed heavily and took a long slug of his drink.

  “Okay,” he said. “What I showed you today was only an impression of the truth. An amalgamation of what happened. How do they say it in the movies? A montage? Yes. A montage.”

  “I knew it,” said Tom. “It was something you made up.”

  “No,” said Peter. “Part of what I showed you I did not witness, but is nevertheless an accurate representation of what took place.” He was silent for a moment and the only sound was the settling of logs in the fireplace. “I guess the only way I can do this is to tell you it all from the beginning. It’s a long story, but I can make it manageable if you let me tell it without interrupting.” He raised his eyebrows and looked at Ceri.

  “So long as you men don’t mind me smoking in here,” she said. “And we can take an occasional pee break. I’m a good listener.”

  Peter looked at Tom.

  “I can ask questions when you’ve finished?” said Tom.

  “One or two. But it might be quite late by then and you’ll have a lot to digest. You might find that you’d rather keep the bulk of your questions for tomorrow. And I’d prefer that, too.”

  “Okay.”

  Peter shifted his backside on the cushion, making himself more comfortable.

  “Right then,” he said. “Let me tell you a story. . . .”

  * * * * *

  A long, long way from here—many systems away—exists a planet. It is similar in some ways to this one: oxygen-rich atmosphere, an abundance of water, plentiful ore and mineral resources, almost identical surface gravity, the dominant species bipedal mammalian creatures.

  The main differences between that planet and this can largely be accounted for by the star around which that planet orbits. Billions of years older than the sun in this solar system, that distant star has entered its early death throes. It has expanded, puffing up like an inflating balloon, on its way to becoming what astronomers call a red giant.

  As the star expanded, so its outer edge drew closer to the planet in its orbit. The planet was buffeted by solar winds that increased in intensity as millennia passed. The planet’s surface became ravaged as the winds dried up oceans and rivers, destroyed vegetation and decimated wildlife. With increasing frequency, solar flares added to the devastation of the surface. Very gradually, over many thousands of years, it became a barren wasteland.

  The dominant species—let’s just call them ‘people’—was eventually driven underground. That’s where the water could be found. The people had plenty of time to plan, to develop new technologies and advance existing ones that would enable subterranean life to flourish. Drilling and tunnelling, ventilation, pumping, glass and plastic manufacture, waste disposal, greenhouse horticulture, hydroponics, optics, thermodynamics . . . and many more that humans would not recognise, such as aquapology and geogenics.

  It began on a small scale. Underground settlements the size of villages grew into towns, became cities. Great civilisations that had existed on the planet’s surface were replicated beneath it. All the grand structures—the pyramids, the palaces, the minarets and monoliths—that had been lost were rebuilt beneath protective glass and plastic domes. Prisms and mirrors and light tubes carried sunlight to places not illuminated by the domes. Aquaducts carried water to places not accessible to the vast underground lakes. Subterranean jungles were cultivated to perform the photosynthesis that was slowly decreasing above ground.

  But the people knew it was not enough. It may take many more millennia, billennia even, but eventually their sun would explode, sloughing off its outer shell like a snake shedding its skin. If their planet was able to withstand the blast of debris and still support life, it would not survive the cooling process that would follow as the star changed from a white dwarf to a dark one. Whether fr
om the explosion of the sun or the ensuing cooling, the people knew that their days were numbered.

  They began to turn their attention from the interior of their planet outwards. They already possessed the knowledge and materials for space travel within their solar system, although they had only toyed with the technology, sending out the occasional localised probe more for fun and diversion, rather than for any significant scientific pursuit. But now they had good reason to treat space exploration as something more than a hobby. The ultimate survival of their entire species may depend upon the ability to seek out another planet in another solar system to which they could decamp before their sun exploded.

  They did not waste time on the other three planets in their system. Even if one of them would support their life forms, the problem would only be relocated, not solved. No—they needed to seek beyond their system.

  Deep space travel involves distances that the human mind struggles to comprehend. It involves crossing expanses so vast that reducing them to mathematical expression results in numbers so ridiculously long or ludicrously factored as to become meaningless. The only way to express such distances in vaguely comprehensible ways is to reduce them to absurd metaphor. As an example, to travel from that planet to this at the speed of light would be akin to taking the smallest, lightest, downy feather from a fluffy, newly-hatched chick; place that feather in the palm of your hand on a still summer’s day and wait for the slightest hint of a breeze to waft it gently into the air; now imagine that feather continues to rise into the air on some unfelt updraft and continues rising at that same barely-moving velocity; up and up and up, on and on and on, into the atmosphere and beyond, until one day it passes the Moon; but it continues on through the Solar System until it reaches Mars; then on, and on, until eventually it reaches the last planet, Neptune. That journey would take the feather many, many years. Centuries. So it is with interstellar space travel, even at the speed of light.

  The people knew that they needed to discover the secret of travelling beyond—far beyond—the speed of light. Now the people of that distant planet are governed by the same laws of physics that pertain here: the Theory of Relativity and so on, that forbid the possibility of travelling faster than light. However, they are not limited by the inhibitions inherent in the human intellect. They knew that with their combined wisdom there was a chance that they could discover what they sought and they bent their collective will to achieve a solution.

  They failed.

  Something eluded them. A vital piece of the puzzle remained hidden. And would remain hidden still if not for a remarkable piece of good fortune.

  Life within the subterranean cities went on. At the edge of one of them, near the planet’s equator, a small team of tunnelers was working on an expansion to the storage area of a food depot. They broke through into a vast network of caverns that nobody had hitherto even suspected to exist. There, deep within the caverns’ dark recesses, they made the discoveries that would change their people’s future.

  The remains of an ancient, unknown civilisation. If the civilisation had been distant ancestors of the people, no hint had been passed down in the collective memory. The civilisation’s existence had not so much as been suspected.

  Amongst the remains were found wonderful things that are not pertinent to this tale. Many strange artefacts lay in the darkness of those caverns, untouched for millions of years. The purpose of some of them yet remains unclear.

  A series of tablets formed from a black substance caused much scratching of heads. Upon the surfaces of the tablets, strange symbols and diagrams and other markings. The people of that planet have no use for writing or other forms of record. It took them many years to understand that they were looking at recordings left by that dead civilisation. It took them many years more to begin to decipher them. The people viewed the markings much in the same way that Victorian explorers regarded Egyptian hieroglyphs: with awe and utter perplexity.

  The first tentative translations were greeted with scorn as they were largely nonsensical. However, enough of a hint of what the tablets contained was soon revealed to ensure that the people pooled their resources, their intellects, to tackle the decryption. When it was cracked and the tablets could be read in their entirety, the people rejoiced for here was a fine gift indeed from the ancients. The secret of faster-than-light travel, the missing link in their search, was revealed.

  Not only that. The ancients had understood how to travel at speeds that made deep space exploration practicable, but it was more than mere theoretical knowledge. Much more. The ancients had built a craft.

  The tablets contained a complete blueprint. Materials, propulsion, proportions, dimensions . . . The last one, dimensions, caused a great deal of consternation. The craft built by the ancients had been vast, as huge as a mountain range. The people doubted that they had sufficient of the materials listed in the tablets to replicate the craft on the same scale. In particular, they lacked sufficient of the ore of a radioactive element; one that doesn’t even exist here on Earth. The ancients must have near exhausted the reserves of ore in constructing their craft. The problem wasn’t insurmountable—the ore most likely could be found on the other planets within the solar system—but it would be a lengthy process. One that happily turned out not to be necessary.

  The tablets also contained something that caused further ripples of excitement among the people, and the people are not a species readily given to excitement. A detailed account of the first and, so far as can be ascertained, only journey of the craft. The account is worthy of reading in its entirety, but a brief recount of the key points will suffice here.

  It is not known in what numbers the ancients existed, though it is surmised that they must have extended into many hundreds of thousands, millions even, to necessitate such a large craft for, as has already been implied, a much smaller craft would have been just as capable of safely conveying a living cargo the vast distances involved. However many they were, the vast majority of them made the journey, leaving a mere handful of volunteers behind. Those volunteers faithfully recorded the journey on the tablets from messages that their brethren sent back. What then became of those who remained behind is not known.

  But why would an entire race travel many light years across the galaxy, leaving their home planet behind, at a time when the sun around which they orbited was much younger and millions of years from causing devastation to the planet’s surface? The answer is not so clear from the markings of the tablets, but they contain sufficient hints and references that a satisfactory theory can be confidently propounded. The ancients had enemies. Foes who hunted them and who the ancients were afraid might soon find them. They set off in their enormous craft not to escape the effects of a dying sun that would not occur for many more millennia, but to flee an imminent threat from a deadly and feared enemy. No clue could be found in the tablets as to who, or what, this enemy might be or where it might come from.

  What is certain is that set off they did. Aiming at a promising solar system hundreds of light years away, the craft left the planet, never to return.

  Months later, it arrived in the target solar system. This one. It made for the planet that the ancients identified as most likely to support them, the one with water and vegetation and oxygen. This one.

  The craft plunged into and through the Earth’s atmosphere. It was only then that the flaw in the craft’s design became apparent. So intent had the ancients been upon designing a vehicle that would handle the rigours of interstellar travel, they failed to pay sufficient attention to being able to manoeuvre it when it arrived at its destination. Although the craft contained systems designed to slow it down on descent, the systems lacked finesse. Without the ability to adequately control the descent, the craft crashed into the Earth’s surface.

  More accurately, it came down into one of the oceans, the North Atlantic, near what is now eastern Mexico but what then was probably just ocean. The impact of such an enormous body caused a vast tsunami that wiped
out the dominant life form at the time and that subsequently allowed the mammal to evolve from the mouse-like creature it might otherwise have remained.

  The bottom of the craft gouged out a crater in the shallow ocean bedrock. The bedrock, in turn, ripped the bottom out of the craft. As water rose to fill the interior, the ancients that had survived the crash used their last moments to submit messages back to their home planet, reporting their fatal design error.

  Over the millennia that ensued, the craft was most likely crushed further by continental drift and submerged beneath rising seas. What is left must now lie beneath miles of silt and sediment. The only evidence of the impact is the crater and the disappearance from the fossil record of the life form that the crash rendered extinct.

  * * * * *

  Peter took a long slug of cola. “That’ll do for tonight. There’s more, but it will have to wait.”

  “No,” said Tom. “You said we could ask a couple of questions.”

  Peter inclined his head.

  “Are you saying,” said Tom, “that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a crash-landing spaceship?”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “The tablets on our home planet contained information that enabled us to roughly date when the ancients’ craft set off. The geological evidence on Earth corroborates the date. Around sixty-six million years ago.”

  “Huh! Stupid us thinking it was a meteor when all along it was a flying saucer. I want to. . . .” He tailed off as Peter nodded towards Ceri.

  She was almost asleep. Her head jerked and her eyes opened wider.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. “So tired. . . .”

  “It’s okay,” said Tom. “Go to sleep. The rest can wait till tomorrow. I’m going to have another beer.”

  When he returned, Ceri had curled onto her side on the bench, eyes tightly closed, breathing deeply. Peter, too, had lain down before the dying fire, his eyes shut.

  “It’s snowing,” said Tom. “Heavily.”