by Paul Reaver
John said, “Let’s stay together in one group and explore the opening on the right first. He entered the cave with the bright beam of his flashlight illuminating the way. Ahead lay a tunnel, fairly large. John estimated the width to be 60 feet and the height to be about 100 feet. The size remained uniform, and his flashlight made it appear that the tunnel ended a short distance ahead. After walking approximately 150 feet into the cave, it turned left. It went on for a short distance and stopped about 30 feet ahead, ending in a blank rock wall.
“Ok,” said John. “Let’s go out and try the other cave.”
He led the way out and entered the other cave. Both the cave opening and the tunnel-shaped shaft of the cave itself were half again as large in width and height compared to the first cave. John’s flashlight beam faded out into darkness ahead; this was a long tunnel. After 930 feet according to his measurements, the cave ended, but at the end was a circular opening in the cave floor that was approximately 200 feet in diameter. Above the opening in the floor, the cave ceiling was a hemispherical domed shape, as large in circumference as the opening in the cave floor. John had a feeling that these constructs were artificial; they were too regular to be natural, or so it seemed. It also seemed as though the first cave had been carved out of the rock and then abandoned because it was unsuitable for whatever purpose its creators had in mind. The second cave appeared to be complete, at least for the part of it that they had seen so far. Though the shapes of the caves were regular, it wasn’t as if the walls and ceiling were smooth; they weren’t. But they were consistent in shape and perfectly straight. If the caves were artificial, a smooth surface on the sides and ceiling were apparently not a requirement. However, the floor was very smooth.
John leaned over the edge of the hole in the floor of the cave and shined his flashlight down into it. Though it was fairly deep, the depth did not prevent his flashlight from illuminating the bottom. He measured the depth as being 120 feet. The others shined their flashlights down into the opening as well. The lights revealed that the hole was perfectly round, or it appeared perfectly round, and it held that shape for its entire depth.
“Joanne,” said John. “Is it safe for me to use the antigravity harness to descend into this hole?”
“Yes,” said Joanne. “This is ideal. On your wrist control, make sure you set the horizontal power to zero. That means your downward gravity force will be zero initially. Then you should be able to step out over the opening, and you won’t move up or down. Once you are out far enough to descend and have stopped your forward momentum, change the gravity setting to -0.1. If your forward momentum does not stop you soon enough, briefly press the “Rear” gravity button on your wrist. That should bring you to a stop. Then when you set the gravity to -0.1, you should lower slowly to the bottom. This should all be the same as the documentation I gave everyone for the gravity harness, but if you have any questions, please ask. I know that everyone has not had the time to read it yet. Also, I suggest you take someone with you. I’d be happy to volunteer.”
“No,” said John. “Even though the controls for the gravity harness are straightforward, I don’t want to risk our expert.” He smiled, and though she couldn’t see it, Joanne could hear it in his voice. “Max, would you please accompany me?”
“Sure, John,” he said. “I can go first.”
“I think it would be better if we went down together. I’ll navigate out over the hole, and then you can follow. We’ll descend together.”
“Sounds good,” said Max.
John set his gravity harness to zero so his gravity would be at equilibrium. Then, he gently stepped out over the opening. Joanne had designed the harness to keep the wearer upright in relation to the downward pull of Mars gravity. He had stepped off so gently that he drifted only a few feet before he stopped.
“Max,” he said. “Set your harness gravity to zero and step off as gently as you can so you will stop your forward motion as quickly as possible.”
“Will do,” said Max, and he also stepped gingerly off the edge of the hole. He drifted almost precisely the same distance as John had, so they both were approximately the same distance from the hole’s side, and virtually at the center.
“On my count of three, switch your gravity setting to -0.1,” said John.
“Roger that,” said Max.
“One, two, three,” John counted and set his vertical gravity control to -0.1. Max did the same. Both men slowly lowered to the bottom of the shaft. To their amazement, they faced a short tunnel that ended some 30 feet away with a metal wall and a visible door in the center at ground level. Immediately, the air around them in the shape of a dome approximately 50 feet in diameter and 30 feet tall shimmered and sparkled momentarily. John and Max looked at each other with puzzled expressions. John stepped forward tentatively with his right arm outstretched to reach the spot in front of him where the air had shimmered. When he reached the spot, the place where his hand touched the air at that point glowed and sparkled again. Obviously, it was a force field. It felt more or less like a solid wall, though there was a strange sort of “give” to the surface. He felt a strange sensation in his hand where it touched the field that permeated partway up his arm, and he pulled his hand back quickly, startled. He had no idea what effect the contact with the force field might have on his body. He turned to Max and stated the obvious.
“It’s a force field. Don’t touch it. I felt a strange sensation in my hand and arm when I touched it,” he said.
John was dumbfounded. A force field indicated intelligence, and it also showed evidence of advanced technology. What was going on here?
He turned back around to face the metal wall again and looked at the door, noticing its unusual size. It was about 6 feet wide and 12 feet tall. Did this mean the creatures that built the wall (and the other things behind it) were that large? He thought he would find out soon because he expected the door to open almost immediately. He was not disappointed. The door began to open, and Max and John stared at the door. When it opened up, and they could see what was opening it, what they saw was a robotic creature, approximately nine feet in height and of humanoid shape. The face was smooth, apparently made of some kind of metal. There were two eyes and a mouth, but the face was devoid of a nose, and there was no hair on its head. The eyes were large but human-like, and the mouth was merely a slit. The body and its limbs were also smooth and appeared to be of the same type of metal as the head. The robot was bipedal, but – and here was the most striking thing about its appearance – it had four arms. One pair was where you would expect them to be, complete with shoulders. The other pair of arms was slightly below the top pair but still attached at the side of the torso, which otherwise was featureless and smooth, as were the legs. The arms had no apparent elbows, and the legs had no apparent knees, but they moved as if they did. The other fascinating thing was that its hands had seven fingers, or more precisely, five fingers across the palm instead of only four and as well as two opposing thumbs. Max and John took all this in as the robot began to walk toward them. It appeared to scrutinize them for a few moments, and the force field disappeared.
“Please accept my apology for the use of the force field,” said the robot in perfect accent-less English. “I had to make sure you were not armed. Your electrical protection devices would not affect me.”
There was a long pause as John and Max continued to stare at the robot. This was something that was absolutely and completely unexpected. The “WOW” factor was absolutely off the scale. They did their best to remain calm and just accept what was happening.
“You speak our language,” said John. “How did you learn it?”
“We have been observing your planet for millennia,” said the robot. “We watched as your civilizations evolved, and how they rose and fell. We learned a great deal about you, with one exception being the level of some of your current, more advanced technologies, since some of them are kept well hidden. But we also knew that someday you would travel here t
o our planet. In the last few decades, we knew that your voyage here was relatively imminent due to the level of your technologies for which we did have information. When we saw your ship on its way here, we knew that the time had come for us to meet, and we have been waiting for you.”
“Why didn’t you let us know you were here?” asked John. “We could have been communicating for a long time.”
“We wanted to make sure you were at the level of sophistication required to make the journey here on your own. Without that, we felt as though our technology would ‘contaminate’ yours. You needed to develop your science knowledge yourselves. Once you had done that, we felt as though we could consider ourselves equals, or at least equal enough, to communicate and begin to develop a relationship between our species.
“I’m sure you have numerous questions. I can answer them once I take you through the decontamination process. We must ensure that you do not bring any disease organisms into our facility.”
“But you’re a robot,” said John. “Organisms will not affect you.”
“There is an answer to that question as well. Follow me,” said the robot.
It led them through the door and into a room approximately 30 feet square and 12 feet tall. It was featureless except for an entry on one side, and it had gray walls, apparently metal. “Wait here,” said the robot. “I will start the decontamination process.”
The robot went through a door in the side of the room. It moved too quickly for John or Max to see what lay on the other side of the door.
“You will see a glowing light all around you,” came the robot’s voice into the room. “It will not harm you and represents the decontamination process. It will only take about one of your minutes to complete the process.”
Sure enough, the room began to glow with shimmering green fluorescence. They stood there waiting, and the light went out shortly. The robot opened the door and said, “Come this way, please. You may remove your helmets if you like. The Martian atmosphere differs only slightly from that of Earth’s. It is safe for you to breathe.” They removed their helmets and stepped through the door, looking around in awe. There were sophisticated devices around them of all shapes and sizes. They represented technology that was advanced far beyond that of Earth. The room was an artificial cave, and the space was huge, probably 300 feet square and at least 150 feet tall. Along the back wall, there was an odd construction of what looked like shelves with compartments built into them, which reached from floor to ceiling. There was an extreme number of them, basically countless.
The robot noticed their gaze at the back wall and said, “Those are the real Martians. They are in stasis pods. Each compartment represents one individual. There are five thousand, three hundred, and twelve occupied pods. There are also other robots like myself. (John had already noticed the other robots in the room, working in different areas.) We tend to the equipment that keeps the corporeal Martians alive, among other things. One of our tasks has been to monitor Earth, which is how we knew you were on your way here. There are also androids; the Martians designed them with different configurations. Some look exactly like the corporeal Martians, while others are modified to perform specific tasks, just as we robots are. We have inactivated all of the androids. The reason the robots like us are the only functional beings is that we are more durable and less likely to get damaged should there be an accident.”
“But why aren’t the Martians active?” asked John. “Why are they not up and moving about? Why was it necessary to put them in stasis? By the way, do you have a name? Please pardon all the questions.”
The robot said, “I have a designation that roughly translates into your language as BN112. And to answer your first question, the corporeal Martians were put into stasis due to our circumstances. We know that you are aware that the atmosphere of our planet was blown away gradually by solar winds. It was actually a coronal mass ejection, or CME, of exceedingly exceptional magnitude that caused a catastrophic event that scraped away the atmosphere, oceans, and everything else on the planet’s surface. Since a large CME can release over a billion tons of matter, and reach speeds of several million miles an hour, it’s easy to see why the incident on Mars occurred. The difference between Mars and Earth is that Earth has a protective magnetic field. Mars does not, although it did at one time. If a CME of the same magnitude struck Earth, it would very likely interfere with the function of satellites and other electronic equipment in orbit on the side of the planet facing the Sun. It’s possible that a CME of sufficient strength could inactivate some of the power grids on Earth’s surface but the magnetic field would block most of the other CME’s effects. However, your theory that this happened to Mars billions of years ago is mistaken. It only happened approximately a millennium ago. The magnetic field collapsed just a hundred or so years before the CME event. Our scientists still don’t know why, but we knew we had lost our protection from the Sun. We also knew the CME was coming, but though we had learned to predict CMEs, and even predict their intensities, there are still unpredictable variables for them. It is somewhat like how Earth predicts atmospheric weather. Your scientists can predict dangerous storms, and track them with varying degrees of success. But like tornadoes, for which you can only verify that conditions are likely to produce one, you can’t always predict when or where they will occur very far in advance, if at all, with a significant degree of success.
“That was where we were with predicting CMEs. We knew conditions were indicating that a large-scale CME was imminent, and probably going to manifest itself in our direction, but we could only predict a general timeframe. The other difficulty with the prediction was that we couldn’t be exactly sure what direction the CME would take. As I’m sure you know, the Sun goes through an 11-year cycle from a ‘quiet’ state to a ‘maximum’ state when it is most active with solar flares, sunspots, CMEs, and the like, although they can occur at any time. But they are more likely to occur the closer you get to the maximum peak. We had planned to build facilities like this one to protect all of the Martians years ahead of the next solar maximum, since we could predict that it would be very active. However, the CME that struck our planet preceded it by almost half of the cycle and left us only enough time to build this one facility and allowed us only to save a handful of Martians.
“The main activity to solving our current dilemma is that we have sent out eight very sophisticated probes to search for new planets to which we could migrate. Their targets are planets that we feel quite sure would support our kind without any terraforming. We could find no sign of sentient beings on these planets, though we saw many instances of non-sentient life. The choices of the planets were very specific. The searching equipment we used to find the worlds was quite technologically advanced. With this advanced sensor equipment, when we looked at these planets, it was almost as though we were there. We even toyed with the idea of sending Martians in suspended animation with the ships to verify the accuracy of our information. The decision not to do so was based on our unwillingness to put any of our people at risk, when the robots on our probes can do the job just as well. The robots that we sent were models similar to mine and also self-aware. We are currently waiting to hear back from the robots on the probes to study their results. However, if we can repair the damage done to this planet, our home, we would much rather stay here.
“Since you are here, and you have your own advanced technology, we are hoping that combining your technology with ours will enable us to accomplish that.”
“Okay,” said John. “You are BN112. I’m going to call you ‘Ben’ if you have no objections. Ben is a name we use on Earth. My name is John, and the person here with me is called Max. And we will be glad to help in any way we can, but I fear that your technology is so far advanced beyond ours that if you can’t figure out a solution to your problem, there is no way that we will be able to do so.”
“Ben is fine,” said the robot. “I find the sound of it pleasing. And as far as your assisting us, remember th
at I said we had monitored your societies and empires as they rose and fell over the centuries. One of the great attributes of your people is their ability to overcome great obstacles and improvise in the face of adversity – and we can see that is true even if the adversity is not your own. As I indicated earlier, we anticipated that you would one day find your way to our planet. Our plan for that event, which has now transpired, is to wake two of our people who are in stasis to meet with you.”
“I look forward to that,” said John. “However, you undoubtedly know that there are more people here from Earth than just the two of us.”
“Yes, we know that there are additional people at the mouth of the cave and that you have a ship not far from here, and that the rest of your team is there.”
John said, “Then let me suggest that we return to the ship to pick them up and have everyone be here when you wake your people. If they hear the entire explanation, they will have all of the information as to your dilemma. You never know, this may help them form better ideas and scenarios to assist your people in the long run. You’ve waited this long; surely you can wait a little bit longer.”
“I couldn’t agree more, John,” said Ben. “Please, by all means, take your vehicle and transport the rest of your people here. We can certainly wait a bit longer.”
