by T I WADE
“I am beginning to believe that this tribe, these people are the same. By thinking the same, they advanced themselves in science and exploration faster than anybody else living on Earth ever did. We have that ability, but are clouded in our judgments by others who have a different agenda.
“As a scientist, my beliefs differ from the person whose goal is to amass money and wealth. Yes, work hard for a comfortable secure life, but do not steal, rob, or pillage for mountains of glitter or fake power you can never use in a lifetime. I believe the belief system of these people were more in line with true science and, what really interests me, is what we are going to learn from them. Herr Noble, have you found one metal, plastic or synthetically-made weapon these people owned?” VIN replied that he hadn’t. “I believe, team, that we won’t.”
Everyone listened intently to the German lady, and heads nodded in agreement. Even Jonesy listened closely, gaining insight into how these scientists ticked. The crew aboard America One was changing.
Ryan reasoned that leaving the rest of humanity behind gave one the opportunity for change.
Twenty-four hours later, Astermine Two left for DX2017. For the second visit the shuttle carried the same five men squashed into the forward and rear cabins, plus the same nuclear battery in the cargo hold they had used to open the doors in the base on Mars. The flight down was brief, only one orbit, and within two hours they were touching down. The battery was in the mining craft’s rear cargo bay, and was to be used in a single three-hour spacewalk into the cavern to see if any doors could be opened. The scientists did not want any atmosphere to be released into the caverns until every room had been inspected. With absolutely no atmosphere around DX2017 compared to Mars, there was a better likelihood that any remains would be better preserved. All of the men knew exactly what to do.
VIN loved his job. As head of security he could go where no man had gone before. He always saw everything first, and encouraged by Dr. Petra’s ideas, he wasn’t worried about trip wires, or mines, or any possible dangers as he explored new territory. He was still a Marine though, a darn good one, and he never forgot his training. He trusted what the scientists said, but he still entered every new area as if it was booby-trapped. He was armed, his Bowie knife connected to his suit’s belt. He still wasn’t taking any chances.
VIN entered the docking port first. Jonesy stayed in the pilot’s seat, and one by one, Ryan, Igor and Boris followed VIN down the ladder and into the first cavern. Nothing had moved inside the cavern, or was out of place since his last visit. He climbed onto the two canisters, and into the horizontal tunnel leading to the silver-walled alien cavern. The other three space-suited men handed up the nuclear battery to VIN. It had also taken three of them to lower it down the vertical shaft. The battery was slightly heavier on this planet than on Mars with its lesser gravity; equal to about 250 pounds Earth weight, he had to work hard to place the heavy unit onto the floor of the tunnel.
After moving it out of the way, VIN helped the three men enter the tunnel. Together they lifted the battery through the right turn and into the cavern. They placed it next to the staircase and the two Russians prepared to connect the live open ends of the wires to the metal railing of the staircase.
Within minutes they had it connected and Igor turned the battery dial from zero to 10 percent power. He didn’t leave it there long knowing that nothing would happen. At 20 percent, the walls began to glow. At 30 percent they became as bright as neon lighting and panels began to open here and there. For the first time, he tried 40 percent, but nothing further happened.
“I believe that their power ratings equal our battery at 30 percent,” he said into his intercom. The next problem was how to open the door, which seemed to only be activated by VIN looking into the panel with his naked eye. They had discussed it the day before separating from the mother ship.
They had two choices. Either VIN could open his visor for the few seconds required, or Igor could tie the battery into the same wall connection he used on the first cavern wall on Mars. Ryan preferred to try the latter while the doctors and scientists in the mother ship tried to produce an exact replica of VIN’s eye, which would take a week.
VIN said that if he would not be allowed to take the risk using the special visor the electronics crew had modified for this task, he was prepared to take his chances and open his visor in the vacuum of space. Under his helmet he was wearing a tight nylon balaclava and an additional mouth piece to supply oxygen.
It took twenty minutes for Igor and Boris to connect the open battery wires, dozens of them, into the eleven holes in the alien wall socket. However, when they tried to open the door it didn’t budge, even at 45 percent power. The cavern was glowing so, brightly it looked like it could explode.
“So, now what do we do?” Ryan asked. “How much time before Mr. Noble is affected by the lack of pressure when he opens his visor?”
“As we discussed yesterday,” began Boris, “even with the pressure in his suit at maximum, it will take only a few seconds after he opens his visor before the pressure inside the suit dissipates. I think VIN is safe for three seconds or he will lose too much pressure. The extra mouthpiece to breathe through will protect his internal systems. Or we can just bring down air, seal off this cavern and do what we did on Mars: build up the air and pressure.”
“Mr. Noble, how long did the security system take to scan your eye?” Ryan asked. “Please confirm the three to five seconds, you stated yesterday.”
“Affirmative,” replied VIN. “With this airtight balaclava on, and believe me, it’s tight, and only my eyes and mouth open, I will be fine for five seconds. I want somebody to count up to five for me and give me the signal to hit the control to close my visor. It only takes half a second for the visor to open or close. I already feel that the seal on this new helmet is not 100 percent. The dials on my suit are showing my inside conditions to be slightly off.”
“Okay, let’s try it. We get out immediately if Mr. Noble feels any ill effects.” And Ryan prepared his crew for something very dangerous.
The human body doesn’t just explode in a vacuum. Heat does not transfer away from a body quickly because of the containing effects of the skin and circulatory system and, loss of consciousness occurs only after the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood.
The temperature inside the cavern was warmer than outer space. Igor looked at the suit dials on his forearm; it was minus one hundred and ten degrees Celsius, survivable for the few seconds VIN needed. Only his eyes were in real danger, and he wore a pair of clear worker protection glasses underneath his visor. Jonesy had put them on his face when VIN opened and tested his visor just before leaving the craft.
He readied himself, knelt down in front of the four-foot high control panel, took a couple of deep breaths, opened both eyes and pushed the button on his suit to open his visor.
He suddenly got dizzy; he began to feel his body was being sucked out of his suit through the visor, but he kept his watering right eye glued to the center of the panel. The cold was like nothing he had ever felt on his face before. He had ridden motorbikes in the middle of winter without a helmet; as a Marine, he had dived into freezing cold water to toughen up; but the excruciating cold on his exposed skin was much worse than even what he had felt on Mars when he had damaged and punctured his suit. The solid wall of cold was hitting his face. Still his one open eye, feeling that it was being pulled out of its socket, was trained on the panel which responded with its familiar blue blast at the exact moment someone hit him over the helmet to tell him time was up. He didn’t move for what seemed like another second before he saw movement to his left, and he turned the switch on his belt to close his visor.
VIN felt dizzy. He couldn’t hear anything and suddenly felt a muscle spasm hit him hard up his left arm. He could feel the pressure building in his suit and as it did, he straightened his arm. Immediately the spasm softened, and then disappeared. “Must be like the bends,” he thought to himself.
He felt three gloves holding his body upright, and then he took his first breath since he had opened his visor. The air was there, it was sweet and he was okay, so far. His lips felt dry, so dry they were cracking, even though Suzi had thoroughly coated them with a thick layer of lip gloss. His eye began to burn and water, reminding him of the bad pollen in North Carolina during spring time.
Slowly the suit pressurized back to normal and for the first time in his life, he realized what these suits did, and how well they protected them.
He staggered to his feet, his head still swimming. “Is it so nasty on the other side of my thin suit?” he thought and floated his right hand through the vacuum in front of him. He would respect the nothingness of space when taking a walk outside from now on.
All this had only taken seconds. Ryan’s voice over the intercom penetrated his consciousness, “Are you okay, Mr. Noble? Mr. Noble, are you okay?”
VIN slowly formed the diving sign that he was okay. He carefully sat down on the metal staircase to allow his brain and his bodily systems return to normal.
It took a minute, with the other three watching him. He felt as though he had fainted or something but as the suit warmed his cold body and sweet air was drawn into his lungs, his balance returned.
He raised his head. Nobody had moved; they were all staring at him, and he looked past them into the just opened door.
“Do you see what is inside the room?” VIN asked, and all three turned to look inside the exact same room they had first seen on Mars. The same empty room with the same cabinets on both opposite walls; the same room VIN had thought to be the morgue; the same room where he found the first three suited bodies on Mars.
With trepidation he stood up and decided that if anybody was going to find more dead people, or aliens, it might as well be him. He walked unaided into the room and looked for the same narrow groves. They were all there, in rows of four and he pressed the one closest to him.
The handle shot out glowing red, as all had done down on Mars. VIN closed his eyes as the cabinet opened and then opened them again to find… nothing. The drawer was empty. So was the next one and the next one. Then he remembered that he was on the second side of the room they had opened. The three bodies were found in the middle cabinets on the opposite wall, the right hand side.
“Igor, Boris, you open the rest of these. Tell me what you find. I will open the ones on the other side where we found the bodies.”
With trepidation he touched the handle of the same cabinet he had first opened back on Mars.. It was empty, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
All of the cabinets were empty. It looked like there weren’t any bodies aboard this base, yet.
The spacewalk time was up. It was time to return to the mother ship. VIN had a splitting headache and he needed water and a beer and a spot under the sunlamp.
“So, Mr. Noble, how do you feel twenty-four hours after your face braved outer space for the first time?” Ryan asked at the next morning’s meeting. “I see that your lips are dry and might crack. Have Suzi or the doctors given you any medication?”
“My head still feels like I had a few beers yesterday, which is true, so other than my dry lips, for which my wife is allowing me to use her precious supplies of lip gloss, and the skin on my face that itches like the last time on Mars, I’m fine. It seems that suntan cream and lip protection weren’t included in the medical supplies. I suppose nobody thought we would need it out here.” Ryan smiled. In the $13 million dollars’ worth of medical supplies, nobody had thought of suntan oil, or lip cream. He was sure that another million items had also been forgotten.
It was a short meeting. On the agenda was how much air they had, and whether they should fill the caverns with it. They had nearly enough for one cavern. It was worth filling the caverns one by one, as they would be here for the next year or two, but a full reconnoiter of all the rooms running from the first cavern should be undertaken before the valuable air was released. Who knew what they might find in there?
VIN had the rest of the day off, and spent it with Suzi in the cubes. Little Mars was beginning to walk. It seemed easier for a baby to walk in higher gravity conditions on the upper deck, than in the cubes. Mars actually smiled more when he was allowed to float around, tied to a cord attached to Suzi’s waist band. Seeing that floating was his thrill in life, over the weeks Suzi had let him out on a longer and longer cord, until he was now happy on a cord 10 feet long.
The cubes looked like jungles of plants of every type. It was hard to believe that 80 percent of all the food eaten aboard ship came from these seven cubes. For another year or so the balance of their food would still come from the stores gathered down on Earth.
Each cube had its own ecological environment A couple of them looked like fields of crops, others like real jungles with birds and bees flying around. Some were at 70 degrees, others at 85. VIN was glad that Suzi, Mr. Rose and their team knew what they were doing. It was a long drive to the nearest take-out.
All that day he wondered about the empty cabinets. Maybe this base was the supply base, and it was empty of people because nobody else was alive in outer space. Maybe the scientists were right; this planet was a good bus ride around the solar system, and not used anymore. He was to get a few questions answered the next day.
VIN felt better; his face stopped itching and his lips were well glossed. He donned the balaclava in the mining craft, when they touched down 20 hours later. The same group was returning to the underground chambers to search for whatever they could open.
VIN was wearing the special helmet. He would need to use his eye again to open the next door. Ryan wanted to open the control, or command center from the next room before any air was purged into this one cavern the next day.
Better mentally prepared, VIN opened his visor at the panel that would take them into the room where they had found the globe of Earth, and which would open doors into the three different rooms. One door would open into the command center, the one to his right would lead into the power room where they hoped to find a second shield control system, and the third, if it was there on the left, would be the same one he had not yet managed to open.
The third door had proved to be impossible to open on Mars. They had tried everything, but without success.
The nuclear battery was still placed in the outer cavern to protect VIN. The blue light pierced his eye and the same door opened. On Mars they had taken a couple of hours to wire the battery up to the power connection on the wall, now they knew that VIN’s eye did the same job.
With his visor down, feeling as dizzy and disoriented as the first time, the other three steadied him when he stood up. It took a minute; his face felt like it had been subjected to another serious sunburn. They all walked into the Globe Room together, the walls already glowing in low-power pink light.
The globe on a tripod pedestal was there, identical to the one on Mars, the same silver metal covering it. Only, there wasn’t one, there were five silver globes in a line.
“Okay, it seems we need to have some power in here,” demanded VIN. “Power up the system like the last time to open the doors and take the metal off the globe. We still have 147 minutes before we end this spacewalk.”
“We will have pressure and atmosphere in here tomorrow I promise, Mr. Noble. I can’t risk your handsome face anymore,” replied Ryan and promptly got connected to Jonesy to ask him to relay a message up to America One; he wanted the air tanks down here ASAP. The crew on America One heard the message at the same time Jonesy did. Just as on Mars, once the walls were powered up from the battery, their intercoms immediately had improved to perfect communications, even up to the mother ship.
Captain Pete replied that Allen Saunders and Michael Pitt would be leaving within the hour.
The team headed out to Jonesy, collected the second battery and man-handled it down the shaft, up into the hole in the wall and through to the room they were working in. They had a two-hour wait for Igor and Bori
s to splice the ends of the cables and, part by part, connect different cables into the eleven holes of the power connector.
Time was running out on this spacewalk but Ryan and VIN had no choice but to hang around.
Finally the men were done, and they were ready to turn on the power. Ryan wasn’t worried if anything happened outside, Jonesy and the recently landed Astermine One were a hundred yards away from the vertical shaft.
“Mr. Jones, astronauts outside, please prepare. We are powering up the underground systems with the second battery. Everybody, just give us ten minutes, in case the blue shield is activated or something unexpected occurs.” Jonesy acknowledged his message and Ryan gave Igor the okay to start the power.
Igor immediately turned it up to 20 percent. With another 20 percent coming from the first battery back in the cavern, the whole area lit up like a Christmas tree. Two doors opened on opposite walls, the one into the command room, and the door into the power room where the security flap again opened on the opposite wall, the same panel he could not open on Mars. Then his attention focused on the globes and all four men just stood there wordless.
Chapter 11
Bonanza! Mars, Europa, Ganymede, Titan, and Earth.
The four men just stared at the five globes, and all could tell that Earth was the first one. The second was orangey-red and the others mostly cream or yellow. VIN could see the red dot in the middle of the Sahara on the first globe, and then noticed a red dot on each of the globes.
