Timelines

by Bob Blink

  “What if we damage those, perhaps blow them open, or isolate them from the station?” Carol asked, still looking for a way to bring the complex down. “Would the complex blow up if we could do that?”

  Al shrugged. “With no knowledge of the design, I couldn’t guess. The power system may be built with fail-safes so that it would just shut down. Perhaps the equipment would be damaged, but the station itself would survive. Or, maybe it would overload as you hope and blow up spectacularly. We don’t know enough yet.”

  I could tell she was disappointed. The domes were the only structure that seemed to offer an opportunity for damaging the station. Curious, I pointed out the window and asked, “Any idea what that small band that seems to work its way around the structure might be?”

  This time Al actually grinned. “John and I wondered how long it would take for you to notice that.” He looked over at John who was smiling as well. “We examined the structure with binoculars. It appears to be a transparent material that wraps around the station anywhere we can see the structure. It looks to be a partial cylinder with a flattened bottom.”

  I thought I knew where he was headed, but still I was hesitant as I said, “You mean an access way?”

  “I think so,” he responded, pleased that I had guessed his meaning. “We thought it might be, but John was able to verify that’s what it is by finding the key files. Not only do the files explain that it is an access to the outside of the complex that wraps all the way around the station, but it has access into areas we haven’t been able to reach before.”

  “Like the power room,” Carol asked instantly.

  “Like the power room,” Al agreed.

  “But we’ve been through the whole station for years. We haven’t found any access,” she argued.

  “They disabled it,” John supplied. “There is one problem with the access. Apparently there are some high levels of gamma and particle radiation. Probably radiation produced by the power system. So, to prevent access unless absolutely necessary, the station access has been disabled. I suspect they used it frequently during the building, but once the station was powered up, they didn’t go outside often.”

  “Can we re-enable it?” I asked. Carol had provided very effective radiation protection suits from uptime a long time ago. So far we hadn’t found a need for them, but we have four of them waiting in the downtime equipment room.

  “We can,” John verified. “Actually, I should say we have already.”

  “Where is the access?” asked Carol eager to explore.

  “Back in the power room. Along the side of one of the transparent walls. We haven’t tried to go inside yet. We’ll show you after we’re done here.”

  They had learned a bit more about the various positions and controls around the perimeter of the ship. The usual systems seemed to be represented. Power, propulsion, life support, communications, navigation. Interestingly enough there didn’t appear to be any weapons control. Carol was disappointed to learn that. She had hoped we might have gained access to a powerful weapon with our control of the ship. The alien’s rifles might do the trick against the creatures themselves, but they weren’t likely to be at all useful against another ship, nor could the hand weapon help with the probable need to destroy the time complex itself.

  “We have one more break-though I want to show you, but that’s better seen back inside the control room,” John told us.

  We followed him back inside, curious to see what he had found. Carol was quizzing Al, trying to learn as much as she could about the access tube outside the station. Back inside the complex, John did something at one of the computers, and the large display panel on the back wall came back to life. It now showed the view we had first noticed inside the alien ship of the multiple star systems and the pale blinking dot that moved between the stars. I could tell that the position of the small dot was much closer to one of the star systems than it had been the other day. I wondered how fast the damn thing traveled.

  “We discovered the program that was driving the display,” John explained. We searched the systems here inside the complex and found the same program. We activated it, using the same settings as the version in the ship, and we get the same image.”

  “It’s not a copy of the ship’s output,” Al added. “As near as we can tell, the station has its own communications array, and is receiving the signal independently.”

  We stared at the display for a moment, once again a bit overwhelmed by the implications.

  “Oh, and we have identified the star systems,” Al informed us. Pointing with his finger at one of the bright dots with the flashing purple square he said, “That’s us.” I was encouraged to note that the large purple dot that appeared to be moving between systems was currently moving away from the system he identified as our own. It had already passed two other star systems since leaving our own. “The others vary in distance from our own by eight to sixty-plus light years. That’s a long way, but they are all really local systems.”

  More evidence they were up to something on a grand scale. We were only one little piece of the project they had on-going.

  Finally, after a bit of encouragement from Carol, we headed back to where the room of equipment sat undisturbed as it had since the first days Carol and I had found the complex. Back in the room we found the four radiation suits I had thought about earlier, as well as a small rack of test equipment. Mounted on large rubber wheels, it was easy to move around. I recognized the equipment and realized they had already set things to monitor dangerous radiation levels.

  “I knew you were going to want to open things up,” Al stated. “Since we don’t know what kind of levels, I thought we should at least get into the suits. We can open up the access and allow the equipment to get a reading. If it is too high, we can shut down immediately. If not, we have the option to move forward, monitoring the levels as we go.”

  Wondering how wise this was, I climbed into my suit while the others did the same. We had closed off the room, so any radiation that leaked once we opened door wouldn’t escape into the common areas. Whatever radiation was present, the clear walls seemed to completely shield it. We hadn’t detected anything above background radiation in any of the testing we had performed over the years.

  Al walked over to the glowing panel that now appeared in the wall. That had never been there before, completely hidden inside the clear plastic wall. I wondered how it worked. He and John had clearly done some studying on the function, because he confidently reached up and pressed one corner of the glowing panel. A rectangular light formed in the plastic wall, outlining what had to be a doorway. As we watched, the glowing faded, leaving behind a thin separation in the plastic. Pushing on the inner rectangle experimentally, I felt the panel move away and up, opening a pathway in the wall.

  Al stuck the probe into the newly opened area and noted the readings. “High,” he said, “but not dangerously so. Based on the spectrum and energy levels, these suits will protect us indefinitely against these levels.”

  Encouraged, I stepped into the access, followed by Al with the probe and portable equipment rack. Carol followed next. Then John. We were inside a walled hallway. The equipment was still isolated from us, off to our left. The clear wall separated us from the power units.

  “Could you see this wall from outside?” I asked Carol. I didn’t know if I just hadn’t looked, or whether the inner corridor had been invisible from the outside. She shook her head. So did Al. So, they hadn’t seen it either. We walked the fifteen feet down the corridor, approaching the outer edge of the room. I knew that the far wall had to be the one adjacent to outer space. As we neared the end, the corridor turned sharply to the left, and the radiation levels took another jump.

  “Still acceptable,” Al informed us.

  Approximately five feet beyond the turn, we came to the end of the corridor. There were two doors, one on the right and one on the left. The one on the left clearly opened into the equipment room. The other opened in the s
ide of the complex wall. It had to be the one that opened to space, or more likely into the corridor that ran around the outside of the station.

  Carol, John and I stood back while Al carefully extended the probe and opened the door leading into the power room. He took a reading and then quickly shut the door. “Extremely high levels,” he reported. “Even in these suits we could only remain there a half hour or so. Anymore would be risky. I think we shouldn’t venture there just yet.”

  I had seen the levels and needed no convincing. I wondered what material was used in the transparent walls that blocked the radiation so effectively. The degree of protection it provided was incredible.

  Now came the issue of opening the outer door. Carol wanted to do it. I thought I should. Al and John were willing to let us fight it out. In the end, they retreated back into the main room. Carol reluctantly did the same. I was anchored with one of the safety cables we brought from the base, and with the test equipment in hand, carefully cracked open the door. No escaping air. No large readings from the test equipment. If anything, the levels were lower outside than here in the corridor near the power room. Carefully I opened the door fully and stepped outside into the clear corridor.

  I can’t imagine how it would have been without the artificial gravity. I was momentarily disoriented by the stars that swam around me. Even below me. Although the bottom section of the clear tube was level and considerably thicker, I could see through it as easily as I could anywhere else. I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them slowly. It was glorious. I stood in space, along side the time complex I had spent so much time inside. To my left I could see the ship, jutting out away from the station itself.

  Reluctantly I returned inside to tell the others. Everyone wanted to go now. We decided to go in twos. Al and Carol drew the winning straws to go first. When they returned, John and I would go. First team had to drag the test equipment with them. John and I would be able to look unencumbered.

  They promised to hurry, but even so it took them more than a half-hour. If we hadn’t been in radio contact I would have been convinced something had gone wrong. The station wasn’t that big. None-the-less, I was to learn how absorbing the view from outside could be.

  Carol’s eyes were sparkling as she and Al made their way back inside. “It’s incredible,” she raved. “But I don’t want to ruin it by telling you too much!”

  “Levels are low outside,” Al added. “Nothing like the levels we were seeing inside the equipment area. You could stay out there all day in these suits. There is one area outside where another door blocks the way. I don’t think it’s wise to go through that while the tunnels are active. You’ll understand when you get there.”

  John and I needed no further encouragement. Quickly we moved past our friends and took our turn at seeing outside the station. The transparent tube didn’t hide anything from view. Just outside the doorway, the huge silvery domes extended below and above us away from the station itself. They had to extend more than fifty feet from the station itself. Looking the other way as we started the walk around the exterior of the station, the ship loomed large in front of us.

  “Would you look at that,” John stated astounded.

  I looked. The ship was shaped very like a pair of flattened ovals, a small one pressed into the top of the larger one below. It was easy to see the two levels we had explored from the inside. Even the large view ports we had looked through not so long ago were easily visible. I could clearly see the long tube extending from the station and disappearing into the backside of the upper oval. That was the walkway to the air lock I knew. It was disconcerting to see it extended so far away from the body of the station, sticking out into space. I thought of the many times I had walked down that corridor, blissfully unaware of what lay just on the other side of the smooth metal walls.

  We had stopped our walk. I realized now why it had taken the others so long. We had been outside less than a minute when we found our progress stopped as we stared in wonder.

  “Look at the lower level,” I encouraged John, pointing to large rectangular areas in the hull. The areas were off white in color, but completely flush with the hull. Nothing detracted from the smooth oval shape. From the locations, most of these regions had to be adjacent to the large equipment room on the lower level. There was a much smaller one near the front I noted, but the large ones were all concentrated aft. Propulsion, but nothing that we understood. And nothing that looked like a weapon. That ended that hope.

  We continued our walk, moving along what must be the outside wall of the lab area. The station itself was angular, with none of the grace of the ship. Moving forward, we were able to see the lower level of the complex come into view. Another oval, although this one with high vertical walls. The bottom was hidden, and the top was an oddly tapered transition from the squarish upper section to the oval below. Protruding from the vertical sides at regular intervals were cylindrical tubes that each extended thirty feet or more from the main body. Arrayed around the outer edge were a number of oddly shaped devices, some that ended with sharp looking fins pointed into space.

  “It’s fuzzy,” John remarked.

  He was right. The end of the tube farthest from the station became blurred, the edges indistinct. The tubes ended in vaguely cone shaped ends, showing they were fully insulated from space, but were difficult to see clearly. I realized I couldn’t really tell where the tubes ended. These were what the operating time tunnels looked like from the outside. I wondered how different they would appear when they were inactive. Unfortunately, the two inactive ones were on the side facing away from us.

  Realizing we were once again delaying the excursion, John started off in the lead. We passed by the outside of the control room, and came to the spot where the tube extended out towards the ship.

  “Here’s the junction, said John from a few yards ahead of me. “I can see what he means about the route down to the tunnels.”

  A minute later I reached the junction myself. The upper walkway continued its circuit of the station. The other path was barred by another door and was covered with the alien symbols. Even with no knowledge of the language they looked threatening. A warning I was certain. Looking through the transparent walls, I could see how the pathway disappeared out of sight to the lower level. Below I couldn’t see the junction, but transparent tubes made their way out to the machinery on each of the tunnel external surfaces.

  “Let’s continue,” I indicated. The rest of the path around the station was much the same. Only on the far side we found another junction. Following the upper junction we made our way up to the ‘roof’ of the complex. There was an airlock door here, which would allow one to exit into space, and there was a large array of gear. I was certain it was the communications equipment, although the antennas bore no resemblance to anything I had seen before.

  In the end, we took even longer than Carol and Al. John wondered where they had come up with the material to build the massive complex. Had they taken it from the surface of the planet, or brought the whole thing intact on one of the larger ships? The amount of material and the energy required to move something this large staggered the imagination. More than forty minutes later we returned to the start, and made our way back inside. The four of us made our way single file back into the room where we had donned the radiation suits earlier, and after closing the external access, we removed the protective gear.

  The experience had been wonderful, but at the moment I wasn’t sure how useful it was. I couldn’t see any way we could use what we had seen to help us disable the station. If we could shut down all the tunnels, maybe we could damage the equipment on the outside. We simply didn’t know how, and I suspected that would only cause a delay, not end the aliens project as we wanted.

  Al had been thinking about the time complex in light of what we had learned about it being in a low orbit in space as well as the fact the uptime tunnel was really concurrent with the time of the station itself. Not that it shed any light for
the moment on how to destroy it.

  “Have you thought about the incredible precision required to make this system work?” he asked. “Consider the fact the time complex is in an orbit that is not synchronous with the revolution of the earth below. That alone means a very complicated relationship between the spinning earth below and the orientation and location of this station. Then add to that the motion as the whole system moves through space over a period that spans almost sixty thousand years of history. Furthermore, each of the tunnels is set up to allow a traveler to enter or leave from a precise location that appears not to move more than a fraction of a centimeter during all the time the tunnel is available.”

  “It seems even more strange in light of what you are saying that they keep the tunnels open all the time,” John noted.

  “We still don’t know all the reasons that might drive their decision,” Al responded. “I have always wondered about the very early tunnel where we have our base. What possible reason could they have to keep that particular one? Now I wonder if the system doesn’t require it. Maybe a sort of calibration or control endpoint?”

  “What do you mean?” Carol asked.

  “What if the incredible precision required to open tunnels in precise locations and times requires the system to have a baseline, spread over the years to be visited, perhaps even well beyond? One endpoint could be the present, as represented by the station. The other endpoint is represented by the tunnel era where we have established the base. Maybe they actually needed it at one point, or maybe there is a mathematical relationship describing how far back in time it must be, given the range of dates they choose to visit. I need to think about this when things calm down a bit.”

  Mike found us in animated discussion, comparing notes about all we had seen outside as well as the theories that Al had proposed. Nothing we discussed suggested a viable plan to destroy the station with certainty.