by Marc Everitt
“Would you happen to know what that stuff is,” he gestured at his stomach, “and how I’m not dead anymore?”
“It’s doubtful you were dead. But this ‘stuff’ as you call it could probably cure that as well.”
“What is it?” he persisted. The Executive had dealt with questions like this for years and had developed a by-pass mechanism to avoid them.
She smiled and stood, brushing down her tunic, “Well, Mr West. Let’s just say it isn’t antiseptic cream.”
Taylor sighed. He knew that already, stupid woman. He didn’t like to be deflected. The liquid he had found in the creature’s lair was obviously something this woman had come across before and he intended to know everything she knew about it. He contemplated the old-fashioned technique whereby the handsome stranger extracted information from a woman captor by means of seduction, but decided that would be unlikely to work.
As it happened another individual joined them swiftly after he thought about it and so the idea became redundant. “Executive Carlton. You sent for me,” purred the wild-haired old man smoothly. His voice was the total antithesis of his appearance. He looked tired and bedraggled, a stereotypical scientist. Taylor thought his voice, however, was that of a late night radio DJ and he felt a sudden urge for some late night jazz for all the space truckers out there.
“Dr Skandia. Thank you for coming so quickly,” Carlton greeted the old man warmly yet efficiently. Their attention returned to a casually relaxing Taylor, who was leaning back in his rickety chair, as if it were a luxury padded armchair. Taylor had long ago learned the value of mannerisms when dealing with people and he wanted to appear to be calm, when in actual fact his mind raced.
“Ah, you must be the man I have heard about,” the scientist shook his hand firmly and seemed genuinely pleased to see him. Dr Skandia turned to Carlton, still grasping Taylor’s hand in both of his.
“He has it all over him I am told. Is that right?” The woman nodded her confirmation and Taylor wished someone would tell him what he had all over him.
“Dr?” he asked mildly.
“Yes, my boy,” the old man seemed to want to help, Taylor it was time to put that to the test.
“What is this stuff?”
The old scientist looked at the Executive as if asking for permission and then replied, “The truth is we just don’t know.”
‘Oh’, thought Taylor, ‘that was a bit of a let-down’.
“Let me show you something,” the Dr said as if realising he had disappointed Taylor.
The Executive shook her head, “No. There is no way we are letting him know anything more than he has to. He goes nowhere near your Lab,” she stated firmly. Her arms were folded across her chest in a sign of implacability. The old scientist looked like a child who had wanted to show his friend his zero gravity train set and who was told by his mum that it was time for his friend to go home as dinner was nearly ready.
An idea occurred to the wily old man. “But I need to run some tests on him. If he has come into contact with the fluid outside laboratory conditions then he could be vital to our understanding of how it reacts to certain atmospheric elements. I need to test him and the only way of doing that is in my lab.”
He smiled triumphantly as the Executive caved in to his request. “OK, but he goes in there blindfold.”
Taylor couldn’t help it, he laughed out loud. “Make sure you spin me round a few times before leading me out of the room so that I have no sense of direction.” It was obvious to him after a few seconds that the Executive hadn’t found his comment amusing and he tried to keep a straight face.
“Mr West, I…..”
“Taylor,” he interrupted once more.
“Will you please stop that I was about to say that you are lucky I haven’t had you killed for even being here. This is a highly classified project and I am in command here. If you cannot behave like a reasonable person then I will not allow the Doctor to run his tests. I’ll simply arrange for you to be shot instead. Now which would you prefer?”
Taylor pondered for just a moment, as if the decision were difficult. “Tests, Please,” he replied in a tone that was outwardly subdued and chastised but had just a touch of childish teasing about it as well. The subtlety of the inflection passed the Executive by but did not get past Dr Skandia who smiled and thought to himself that he liked this man already. He was not looking forward to having to kill him after the tests were run.
***
The sight before Taylor’s eyes a few minutes later was unbelievable, and he had seen a few strange things in the last hour. The Doctor had kindly agreed that now the Executive had left the lab he could have his blindfold taken off. The first thing he had seen was the old man’s worn face in front of him, but then as the Skandia stepped to one side Taylor could see a sea of coloured, swirling fluid, exactly like the powerful liquid he had come across on his deathbed, except huge quantities of it. It seemed to be about two metres in front of him and it took a few seconds for him to realise that it lay behind a vast plexi-glass screen. He could see nothing outside the screen except the swirling misty liquid that shone with dozens of interchanging patterns.
The laboratory he found himself in was state-of-the-art Company equipment but it could not hope to draw his attention away from the sight before him. “I know, we all do that at first,” said Dr Skandia, referring to Taylor’s inability to take his eyes away from the screen.
“This isn’t a monitor is it?” Taylor asked.
“No, that is what is on the other side of that screen. It is transparent but over twenty centimetres thick and reinforced,” the Doctor replied proudly.
“What is all this?” Taylor asked as the Doctor ran a high intensity scanner over his stomach to study the effects of the liquid.
“This lab? Well, we have been here for a couple of years now. The second survey team to land on the planet in 2489 reported a strange inability to dig below the surface. The ground kept resealing itself as they dug, so the Company took an interest and sent us to see what could cause that. And we found this?”
“How did you manage to dig this base then?” Taylor frowned. The room he was in had to be over a hundred metres below the surface of the planet.
The old man replied instantly, “With a lot of trouble and expense. This base cost over ten billion credits to build. It was a case of getting the structure in before the ground had a chance to renew itself.”
Taylor was amazed at the sums of money involved, that much money would buy a dozen starships and leave change for a few houses in the country. “Why did the Company spend so much? And how does the ground renew itself?”
Both of his questions were answered with a pointed gesture towards the liquid behind the screen. “This is a look under the surface of the planet. This liquid constitutes eighty percent of the volume of the planet. It, as you know, has incredible restorative effects. The Company thinks it can study it, copy it and manufacture it at enormous profit. It also works its magic on the crust of the planet, somehow,” the scientist explained to a dumbfounded Taylor.
“How does it do that? Have you managed to work out what the liquid consists of?” He couldn’t get his questions out quick enough.
The old man was pleased to have someone to talk to about the whole matter and continued. “We have seen it is made up of complex amino acid and highly rich proteins but its exact composition changes as we study it. And it is not stable.”
“How so?”
“The planet consisted of eighty two percent liquid a year ago and now it is eighty percent and the liquid is disappearing rapidly.”
“What is the rest of the planet made up of?”
“Ah, now that is the real questions. Look at this,” the old man indicated a thermal sensor on the panel to his left. Taylor’s movement was restricted by the wires that the scientist had attached to his body to measure various bodily functions. He still was able to reach the panel and saw an overview of the planet as if cut through with a knife.
“This blue part is the liquid you see before you. It is under the surface of the whole planet,” explained Dr Skandia.
“And the black part is…..?” Taylor asked, in the centre of the screen he could see another spherical object that was about a tenth of the size of the planet. It looked like the planet’s core, but he had a feeling that it couldn’t be that simple.
“That is a mystery to us, our probes and scans won’t penetrate the liquid which surrounds it. All I can tell you is that is expanding as the liquid dissipates.”
“Is that why the planet has quakes with no plates to edge each other?” Taylor was getting a feel for the concept now as his amazement wore off a little.
“We think so. Every time the core of the planet expands a little it sends a ripple out through the liquid and causes the crusts to shake violently.”
“Why have two bases on the planet. What is the point of having those poor people on the surface with nothing like as sophisticated equipment as you have here?”
“They are the cover for us. The Company is being seen to study the mildly interesting earthquake problem. In fact they know all about that and are trying to divert attention from this station’s work.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Taylor was suddenly very worried. It seemed unlikely the Company would go to all this trouble and expense to keep their operation a secret and allow him to go telling everyone. His worst fears were confirmed. The Doctor was crest fallen that the subject had turned away from the research that was his life’s purpose, especially as it had turned into a discussion he had been hoping to avoid.
He looked Taylor in the eye. “I can buy you time, but if they catch you, you’re done for.”
Taylor blinked hard. “What would happen to me?”
“Your body would never be found. Let’s put it that way. I don’t want any part of it. Go now, before the executive returns with her men. My tests are nearly finished.”
The old man, Taylor realised, was risking a lot to try to let him escape. He wondered why, “I appreciate your warning. I’ve been dead once today and didn’t like it much. What will happen to you if you let me escape?”
The old man shrugged. “It doesn’t matter much. There isn’t much time left.”
“What do you mean?” Taylor paused on his way to the door.
“The rate of increase that the core’s growth is showing means that this planet is unlikely to remain stable for much more than a few days.” He spoke in such a matter of fact fashion that Taylor thought he had misheard him somehow.
The Doctor looked over at Taylor at the doorway. “You must go if you are going to get away. Use the lab coat hanging up outside the door, it will buy you some time.”
Taylor was about to leave the room, but had one more question for his new friend. “If things are that bad, why does everyone stay?”
“No one else knows. I haven’t told the Executive the recent test results and readings,” the scientist revealed as the liquid twisted its way to who knows where outside the screen comprising one whole wall of the lab.
“Why don’t you warn them?”
“I really want to see what will happen, when the core swell increases,” the scientist replied with a smile born out of love for his work.
Taylor persisted, “If the quakes are going to get a lot worse, we could all be killed.”
“Get off the planet as soon as you can, then. I don’t want your death on my conscience.”
“What about you?”
“My life is my work and I have a feeling that my work is about to come to an end. Graves’ World will tear itself apart within 48 hours.”
Appendix 3
Extract taken from the lecture notes of Sir Newton Ashby, titled “The Many Deaths of the Earth.” Delivered to Oxford University 2213
It is fairly well known, even to the layman, that the Earth has been hit, from time to time, by bodies from outer space. Any reasonably sized spatial body cannot help but find itself in the path of such an object over the countless millennia of its lifetime. There are not many people in the general public who fail to subscribe to the theory that the Earth was hit by such a phenomenon around 65 million years ago causing the Yucatan Crater in Mexico and the extinction of most of the life on the planet.
There are even fewer people in the scientific communities who do not believe that the extinction of the dinosaurs can be traced directly to this catastrophic event. A large meteor plummeted to the Earth and landed in Mexico throwing up a colossal amount of debris. This debris stayed in the atmosphere for years and the climate of the world was irrevocably altered and the temperature dropped considerably. The most abundant period of life on the planet was ended in a very short period of time.
The large dinosaurs, being reptiles, needed the warmth of the sun in order to survive to a much greater degree than the warm-blooded mammals. This, of course, led to the end of the dinosaurs and the start of mankind’s tenure on the planet. This much is fairly well known and has been for hundreds of years now. However, there exists evidence that leads a sizeable amount of the scientific community to the conclusion that this was not the only catastrophe sustained by the Earth.
Conventional science maintains that mankind has developed in a linear fashion from a Neanderthal of limited intellect to the creatures we are today. This is almost certainly the case; however, it appears we may have got our time-scales wrong. If the popular theories are to be believed Man lived as a virtual savage until the earliest of civilisations rose up out of the Sumerian area then spread out to the great Egyptian dynasties, and from there to the Greeks, Romans and so on and so forth. While these great civilisations certainly existed and were the glorious empires we have learnt about in our youth, it now seems likely that they were very much second generation civilisations.
There is considerable evidence, both archaeological and literary, to support the belief that there existed at least one ancient civilisation on the planet more than 4000 years before the earliest Sumerian settlements began to develop. The view that Man was a slow starter and lived as a hunter-gatherer for thousands of years does not appear to hold water. Plato wrote of a great sea-faring nation, both warlike and technologically advanced, which existed thousands of years before the development of Athens. He wrote that they came from beyond the straits of Gibraltar (the extreme borders of Plato’s world) and suffered a terrible catastrophe that caused their homeland to sink beneath the waves.
Most scholars of ancient texts have taken this as a metaphorical reference to the end of their empire; however, it may well be a literal reference. Plato received the tale of these great seafarers through a long line of different sources so it may well be apocryphal. There is, however, a precedent in Plato’s writing to find stories and legends to be not worth his trouble and certainly not worthy of space in his work. This would seem to indicate that certainly Plato believed the tale.
There also does seem to have been a great mid-Atlantic power that existed at a time when mankind was supposed to be in his infancy. The Aztecs of South America made reference to their original homeland as being Aztlan. While I do not wish to propose the lost continent of Atlantis as being the source of this and numerous other references to a lost civilisation, which you can see detailed in your lecture notes, it seems clear that these tales have some sort of origin in fact.
But how could this civilisation have disappeared so thoroughly leaving only myth, legend and a few scattered references that do not seem to fit the paradigm of historical belief? Perhaps for the answer to this we need to look at texts that are some of the most ancient in the world. These are religious texts such as the Bible and the Koran. These books as well as sources from ancient legend and folk tales all tell of a great flood. Noah and his ark were supposed to have saved the whole of life on Earth from such a disaster.
Nowadays, it seems fairly clear that forty days of rain would not have caused a flood of the immense proportions described by the ancient sources. The rain simply could not have come dow
n quickly enough to create the kind of tidal waves necessary to do the sort of world threatening damage detailed.
If we accept, which is not by any means unanimous amongst the scientific community, the reality of a gigantic movement of tidal water which almost destroyed all land life on the planet; then we can only have one phenomenon which could be a suspect in the creation of such an event. A dramatic and sudden change in the temperature of our world. Similar to the reduction in temperature which killed our dinosaur friends, except a movement in the other direction.
The world actually got hotter. Suddenly, drastically, the world got warmer by such a degree that ice caps melted and the seas swelled dramatically. This was coupled by vast tidal waves sweeping all over the globe and destroying all in their path. These and only these forces would be sufficient to allow us to take the floods of the Bible and the Koran to be taken literally. Incidentally there are ancient tales of a great flood buried deep in the inherited folklore of almost every civilisation on Earth, originating from a time when the spreading of such tales with mankind’s expansion across the globe was supposedly some thousands of years in the future.
What can we envisage which could have caused the Earth to heat up to this extent and also create the huge tidal forces described. Well, the only suspect could be the arrival at, and near collision with, Earth of a large spatial body moving at an incredible speed. An asteroid would not have been moving at a sufficiently fast velocity, but the remnants of a stellar explosion could have. There is evidence of a vast explosion in our region of the galaxy which could have caused the destruction of the planet which astronomers have agreed existed between Mars and Jupiter and left us with an asteroid belt.
It is entirely possible that a fragment of the stellar matter that totally destroyed this unnamed planet continued through the solar system and passed Earth so closely that it shifted the planet’s orbit fractionally moving it closer to the sun. The passage of this colossal fragment would have pulled the tides in much the same way that the moon does only on much larger and more violent scale.
